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AUTHORS' BIRTHDAYS, 



A Series of Exercises Commefnorative of 

Authors' Birthdays^ with Sketches 

of the Authors. 

LONGFELLOW, LOWELL, WHITTIER, BRYANT, 

EMERSON, HOLMES, POE, HAYNE, 

CARLETON, GARY. 



Bg Carolittft 3il» Stanlegt 



Pbincipal of Training School, Kalamazoo, Mich. 




PUBLISHED BY 

S. E,. WINCHELL & CO. 

CHICAGO, ILL. 






Copyright 1888, by 
S. R. WmCHELL & CO. 



/ 1- 3 ?f /^ 



[Copyright, 1888, by S. R. Winchell & Co.] ^ 

EVENTS m THE LIFE OF ALICE GARY, 
CHEONOLOGICALLY AEEANGED. 



Born near Cincinnati, Ohio, April 26. - - - 1820. 

Death of her mother - - - - - 1835. 

Second marriage of her father - - -. - 1837. 

Began to write poetry _ _ _ _ _ 1841. 

Printed "The Child of Sorrow" in the Sentinel - 1842. 

Published " Poems " first volume - _ _ 1850. 

Visited the East - - - - - - - 1850. 

Moved to New York _ _ _ _ _ 1851. 

Published " Clovernook Papers " - - - - 1852. 

''Hagar, A story of To-day" - - 1852. 

" "Lyra and Other Poems" - - - 1853. 

" "Clovernook Children" - - - 1852. 

" "Pictures of Country Life" - - - 1859. 

" "Lyrics and Hymns" - - - 1866. 

" "The Lover's Diary" - - - - 1867. 

"Snow Berries" - - - - 1869. 

. " "The Bishop's Son" - - - - 1869. 

Died February 12, 1871. 

(3) 



PROGRAMME. 



1. Singing. 

2. Reading. 

3. Recitation. 

4. Recitation. 

5. Recitation. 

6. Reading. 

7. Recitation. 

8. Recitation. 

9. Recitation. 
10. Recitation. 
11- Recitation. 
12. Hymn. 



- " Sketch of Alice Gary." 

- - - "The Singer." 

- " An Order for a Picture." 

- - " Our Schoolmaster." 

- " Alice Gary's Home." 

"OldGhums." 

- - - " Jenny Dunleath." 

- " The Burning Prairie." 
■= "The Gray Swan." 

- "The Weight of Love." 
" One Sweetly Solemn Thought." 



v4) 



ALICE CAEY. 



Born April 26, 1820. - - - Died Feb. 12, 1871. 
PROGRAMME. 



1. Singing _ „ _ _ Hymn by Alice Gary. 
(Tune — Hamburg.) 

"Thy works, O Lord, interpret Thee, 
And through ihem all thy love is shown; 

Flowing about us like a sea, 
Yet steadfast as the eternal throne. 

"Out of the light that runneth through 

Thy hand, the lily's dress is spun; 
Thine is the brightness of the dew, 

And thine the glory of the sun." 



2.— SKETCH OF ALICE CAEY. 



A few miles aortli of Cincinnati there stood, seventy 
years ago, a house, 

"Low and little, and black aiid old." 

There may have been many like it for that matter, but 
this one is peculiarly interesting to us as the birthplace of 
Alioe Cary. Here, in 1820, she was born, and here, four 
years later, one who was to be her companion and sympa- 
thetic friend through life. So interwoven were their lives 
that one would hardly be incomplete without the other. 

The father was a man of superior intelligence though 
deficient in education. He was fond of reading, particu- 
larly romance and poetry, and idealized the homely life o£ 
the farm until it was to him not a weary grind, but a con- 
stant communion with nature. This temperament Alice 
inherited as well as his shrinking, retiring disposition, 

(5) 



t3 AITTHOKS BIRTHDAYS. 

The mother's portrait is painted in "An Order for a 
Picture." 

" A lady, the loveliest ever the sun 

Looked down upon, you must paint for me; 
O, if I only could make you see 

The clear blue eyes, the tender smile, 
The sovereign sweetness, the gentle grace, 

The woman's soul, and the angel's face 
That are beaming on me all the while, 

I need not speak these foolish words; 
Yet one word tells you all I would say, 

She is my mother; you will agree 
That all the rest may be thrown away. 

" Such were the father and mother of Alice and 
Phoebe Gary. Prom their father they inherited the poetic 
temperament, the love of nature and of dumb creatures, 
their pitying and loving hearts, which were so large that 
they enfolded all breathing and unbreathing things. Prom 
their mother they inherited their interest in public affairs, 
their passion for justice, their devotion to truth and duty 
as they saw it, their clear perceptions, and sturdy common 
sense." 

When Alice was fifteen she was left motherless, and 
two years later her father brought a second wife to the 
old homCi The new mother had little in common with 
the young girls, little sympathy for their mental and 
Spiritual needs. 

A niece of Alice Gary's tells a pathetic story of those 
days of toil and nights of study: "This (study) was a 
fruitful source of dissension between Alice and her step- 
mother, who could not believe that burning candles for 
this purpose was either proper or profitable, that reading 
books was better than darning socks, or writing poems 
better than making bread. But the country girls, uncul- 
tured in mind and rustic in manners, not needing to be 



ALICE GARY. 7 

told the immense distance which separated them from the 
world of letters they longed to enter, would not be dis- 
couraged. If they must darn and bake they would also 
study and write, and at last publish; if candles were de- 
nied them, a saucer of lard with a bit of rag for wick 
could and did serve instead, and so, for ten long years they 
studied and wrote and published without pecuniary recom- 
pense, often discouraged but never despairing." 

Happily for the sisters the father soon built another 
house on the farm to which he removed his new wife, and 
Alice and Phoebe with the two brothers were left in pos- 
session of the old home. 

Here the earlier poems were written that found their 
way to the corners of newspapers, and at last attracted 
the attention of more than one in the world of letters. 
We are glad to know, when we think of the lonely 
motherless girls bending over their primitive lamp, that 
the poet Whittier, from his eastern home, sent words of 
encouragement and cheer. In 1850 they visited the east 
and made Mr. Whittier the visit which he recalls in his 
poem, " The Singer." 

In November of the same year Alice Gary left the old 
home and started out alone and unaided to make a place 
for herself in the world, which, in New York, she found 
very large, and very intent upon its own affairs. A year 
later Phoebe and a younger sister were sent for, and there, 
in two or three modest rooms, up two flights of stairs, in 
an unpretending street, they made a home. They had 
little money and less knowledge of the world, but they 
had a belief in their own powers and faith in God, 

They never went beyond their means, and shunned 
debt as one shuns a pestilence. Their literary wares were 
at first disposed of wherever they could find a purchaser, 
and generally at the purchaser's price. It was often 



8 authors' birthdays. 

weary work, but recognition came at last, with better re- 
muneration and many friends. A few years later they re- 
moved to the house on Twentieth street which was their 
home until death called them to a higher one. 

Alice Gary was an indefatigable worker. At her desk 
always at six, and often at five o'clock, she wrote uninter- 
ruptedly through the morning. The evenings the sisters 
always spent together. Among the pleasant memories of 
them is that of their weekly receptions at which all their 
friends were made welcome. 

Alice Gary proved the possibility of uniting domestic 
and literary tastes. Her house was always well ordered, 
and every detail attended to with scrupulous care, but she 
never sunk the woman in the housekeeper. 

The year after they moved to New York, Alice's 
" Clovernook Papers " appeared. Their very simplicity 
and freshness won all hearts, and they sold largely in this 
country and in Great Britain. A second series followed, 
and later the " Clovernook Ghildren." 

A few novels came from her pen, but it is by her 
poems and ballads that she is best known. She felt, con- 
tinually, the limitations imposed upon her by the narrow- 
ness of her early life, and never, herself, felt satisfied with 
her work. 

Alice Gary died at her home in 1870. Mary Glemmer 
Ames, her biographer, says of her life work: " The life of 
one woman who has conquered her own spirit, who, alone 
and unassisted, through the mastery of her own will, has 
wrought out from the hardest and most adverse condi- 
tions a pure, sweet, and noble life, placed herself among 
the world's workers, made her heart and thought felt in 
ten thousand unknown homes — the life of one such 
woman is worth more to all living women, proves more 
for the possibilities of womanhood, for its final and finest 



ALICE GARY. 9 

advancement, its ultimate recognition and higher success 
than ten thousand theories and eloquent orations on the 
theme. Such a woman was Alice Gary." 

"The Singer." 

(By J. G. Whittier.) 

- - - " An Order for a Picture." 

- - - " Our Schoolmaster." 

"Alice Gary's Home." 

From "A Memorial of Alice Gary." 
By Mary Clemmer Ames, 
(pp. 40, 41.) 

- "Old Chums." 
- " Jenny Dunleath."' 
(For two persons.) 

- " The Burning Prairie." 
- - "The Gray Swan." 

- " The Weight of Love." 
" One Sweetly Solemn Thought." 

(Note to be read.) 

In a gambling saloon in Ghina sat two men— one 
young, the other forty years of age. They were betting 
and drinking in a terrible way, the older one giving utter- 
ance continually to the foulest profanity. Two games 
had been finished, the young man losing each time. The 
third game had just begun, and the young man sat lazily 
back in his chair while the older one shuffled the cards. 
The man was a long time dealing the cards, and the young 
man, looking carelessly about the room, began to hum a 
tune. He went on till at length he began to sing- 
Phoebe Gary's hymn, "One Sweetly Solemn Thought." 
While the young man sang the elder stopped dealing, 
stared at the singer a moment, and throwing the cards on 
the floor, exclaimed: 

"Harry, where did you learn that tune?" 

"What tune?" 



3. 


Recitation. 


4. 


Recitatiok. 


5. 


Recitation. 


6. 


Reading. 

Fror 


7. 


Recitation. 


8. 


Recitation. 


9. 


Recitation. 


10. 


Recitation. 


11. 


Recitation. 


12. 


Hymn. 



10 AUTHOES' BIRTHDAYS. 

" Why, the one youVe been singing." 

The young man said he did not know what he had 
been singing, when the elder repeated the words with 
tears in his eyes, and the young man said he had heard 
them in a Sunday-school in America. 

" Come," said the elder, getting up, "Come Harry, 
here's what I won from you; go and use it for some good 
purpose. As for me, as Cod sees me, I have played my 
last game and drank my last bottle. I have misled you 
Harry, and I am sorry. Cive me your hand, my boy, and 
say, that for old America's sake, if for no other, you will 
quit this infernal business." 

A letter to the New York Tribune, after Phoebe 
Cary's death, contained this sequel to the story from the 
man who witnessed the scene: 

" The old man spoken of in the anecdote has returned 
to California and become a hard-working Christian man, 
while ' Harry ' has renounced gambling and all its attend- 
ant vices. The incident having gone the rounds of the 
press, the old man saw it, and finding its ' credit ' wrote 
to me about it." Thus Phoebe Cary's poem, " One 
Sweetly Solemn Thought," has saved from ruin at least 
two who seldom or never entered a house of worship. 



EEFEEENCE BOOKS. 



A Memorial of Alice and Phoebe Gary, by Mary Clemmer 

Ames. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 
Living Age, Vol 63, p. 23. 
Penn Monthly, Vol. 5, p. 705. 
Wide Awake, April, 1886. 



[CopjTight, 1888, by S. K. "Wincliell & Co.] 

EVENTS IN THE LIFE OF EMERSON, 
CHEONOLOaiCALLY AEEANGED. 



Born in Boston _ - _ - May 25, 1803. 

Entered Harvard College - = _ _ _ 1817. 

Graduated from Harvard College - - - 1821. 

Began studying for tlie ministry - - - - 1823. 

Was "approbated to preach" _ _ _ _ 1826. 
Ordained as Colleague to Rev. Henry Ware in 

Boston - - - - - - - 1829. 

Married Miss Ellen Tucker ... - 1829. 

Mrs. Emerson died .__-__ 1832. 

Withdrew from the ministry = _ . _ 1832. 

First visit to Europe - - - - - - 1833. 

Began lecturing on his return - ■.' - - 1834, 

Removed to Concord _____ 1834. 

Commenced a correspondence with Carlyle which 

lasted nearly thirty years _ = _ 1834. 

Married Lydia Jackson, of Plymouth - _ _ 1835. 

Published "iS^afwre" - - - - - 1836. 

Published first volume of "Essays" _ _ - 1841. 

His son died ______ 1842. 

Published second volume of "Essaj^s" = - 1844. 

(11) 



12 EALPH WALDO EMEESO^ST. 

Second visit to Europe - ~ - - - 1847. 

Published "Representative Men" - - _ 1850. 

" English Traits " - - - - - 1856. 

" " Conduct of Life " - - - - I860. 

" Society and Solitude " _ _ _ 1870. 

House Burned ------- 1872. 

Third Visit to Europe - - - - ' - 1872. 

House Rebuilt - - 1873. 

Published " Parnassus " - - - - - 1874. 

" Letters and Social Aims" - - - 1882. 

Died at Concord ----- April 27, 1882. 



PROGRAMME. 



1. Song _----•' Concord Hymn.'^ 

2. Roll-Call - - To be answered by quotations. 

3. Reading _ . - _ Sketch of Emerson. 

4. Recitation - - - - - " The Rhodora." 

5. Recitation » _ _ - " Boston Hymn." 

6. Recitation ------- Boston.'^ 

7. Singing ------ " Hymn." 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 



Born May 25, 1803. - - - Died April 27, 1882. 
PROGRAMME. 



1. SoN"G - - - - - " Concord Hymn." 

(Tune, Old Hundred or any other L. M. tune.) 

2. Roll-Call - - To be answered by quotations. 

QUOTATIONS FEOM EMEESON. 

1. "I wish that life should not be cheap but 
sacred." 

2. " Do not make life hard to any." 

3. " Do not waste your life in doubts and fears; 
spend youself on the work before you, well assured that 
the right performance of this hour's duties will be the best 
preparation for the hours or ages that follow it. 

4. " Nothing great was ever achieved without enthu- 
siasm." 

5. " There is a defeat that is useful." 

6. " There is always room for a man of force, and 
he makes room for many." 

7. " Do your work respecting the excellence of the 
work, and not its acceptableness." 

8. " Nothing is beneath you, if it is in the direction 
cf your life." 

9. " Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices." 

10. "A gentleman makes no noise; a lady is 
serene." 

11. " There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, 
or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain 
around us." 

12. " Though we travel the world over to find the 

(13) 



14 EALPH WALDO EMERSOif. 

beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not." 

13. " The pest of society is egotism." 

14. "Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own 
gift you can present every moment with the accumulative 
force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted 
talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half- 
possession. 

15. " God enters by a private door into every indi- 
vidual." 

16. " That which each can do best none but his 
Maker can teach him." 



3.— SKETCH OP EALPH WALDO EMEESON. 



m the village of Concord, Mass., surrounded by 
stately pines, stands a plain, square, wooden house, with a 
rose garden in the rear. It is not unlike many other New 
England houses, but a new interest attaches to it when we 
know that here for nearly fifty years Ralph Waldo Emerson 
lived and worked. 

It is a hospitable mansion and has many visitors. We 
need not hesitate to enter. 

A long hall with five rooms on each side runs through 
the house. At the right a door leads into the study, "a 
plain, square room lined on two sides with simple wooden 
shelves filled with choice books; a large mahogany table 
stands in the middle, covered with books, and by the mo- 
rocco writing-pad lies the pen which has had so great an 
influence for twenty-five years on the thoughts of two 
continents." A huge fire-place occupies one end of the 
room; a door on each side opens into the pleasant parlor 
beyond. Here for years it was Mr. Emerson's custom to 
receive his friends on Sunday evenings, for conversation. 



authors' birthdays. 15 

some, though not all, of these meetings being of a relig- 
ions nature. 

In these talks his friend Mr. Alcott was prominent, 
and the gentle courtesy of the host made all at ease. Miss 
Alcott says of these gatherings, "I have often seen him 
turn from distinguished guests to say a wise or kindly word 
to some humble worshiper, sitting modestly in a corner^ 
content merely to look and listen, and who went away to 
cherish that memorable moment long and gratefully." 

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, May 25^ 
1803. His father, a Congregational minister, died when he 
was seven years old, and he was left to his mother's care. 

He entered Harvard in 1817, and was graduated, four 
years later, having, during the time, taught school and 
employed himself in various ways in order to defray his 
expenses. 

Descended from a long line of ministers, it was natural 
that he should turn to the study of divinity, and at twenty- 
three we find him, in the phraseology of the time, "appro- 
bated to preach." He was soon settled over a Unitarian 
church in Boston as colleague to the Rev. Henry Ware, 
but doubts arising in his mind respecting a portion of his 
duties, he made these doubts known to his congregation 
and retired from the ministry to devote himself to a life o£ 
study and thought. 

Visiting Europe the following year, he began the inti- 
macy with Carlyle which lasted throughout his life and 
resulted in correspondence kept up between them for nearly 
forty years. Upon his return from Europe Mr. Emerson 
began to appear before the public as a lecturer, and so suc- 
cessful was he in this field that it has been said of him that 
he almost created the lyceum. 

His first published work was a little volume called 
"Nature" which appeared in 1836, His complete works 



16 EALPH WALDO EMEESON". 

are now published in eleven volumes, only one being poetry. 
Mr. Lowell says of him: "There is no man living to 
whom, as a Avriter, so many of us feel and thankfully ac- 
knowledge so great an indebtedness for ennobling im- 
pulses." 

Mr. Emerson was twice married ; first in 1 829, to Miss 
Ellen Tucker, and after her death to Miss Lydia Jackson, 
of Plymouth. At the time of his second marriage he pur- 
chased the house in Concord which was for so many years 
his home. It was partially burned in 1872. The family 
found a home during this time in the Old Manse made 
immortal by Hawthorne, which belonged to the Emerson 
family. Mr Emerson took this time to revisit Europe. 
Vv^hile there, he was informed of the wish of his friends to 
rebuild his house as a testimonial of their love and appre- 
ciation, and it was accordingly restored as nearly as possible 
to its original form and appearance. 

Upon Mr. Emerson's return, he was met by a crowd 
of citizens and escorted to his home between two rows of 
smiling school-children, all singing " Home, Sweet Home," 
to the music of the band. For years after, the school-chil- 
dren were entertained once a year upon Mr. Emerson's 
spacious grounds. 

In appearance the poet philosopher was tall and schol- 
arly looking, with eyes of the strongest and brightest blue. 
His expression was calm and kindly and his manner always 
noble and gracious. His habits of life were simple and 
abstemious and he furnished a noble example of "plain 
living and high thinking." 

In Mr. Emerson's later years there came a gradual de- 
cline of his intellectual faculties, and the year 1867 is given 
as the limit of his working life. His daughter Ellen, how- 
ever, aided his failing memory, and assisted him in his work 
so lovingl}^ and efficiently that he was not condemned to 



authors' birthdays. 17 

entire inactivity but continued to deliver addresses and 
lectures from time to time for ten or twelve years after 
this time. 

The failure of his mind was most apparent in his loss 
of memory. He said plaintively: "My memory hides .; 
itself." A pathetic picture is drawn of him at Longfellow's tj 
funeral, when, looking at the familiar features, he said to 
a friend near him, " That gentleman was a sweet, beautiful 
soul, but I have entirely forgotten his name." To the last 
he enjoyed reading — but forgot at once what he read. 

One of the saddest things in life is to watch the decay 
of a great intellect — happily, Mr Emerson did not long 
.outlive the loss of his powers, but one spring morning in 
1882, as he himself wished they might, " the heavens open- 
and took him to themselves." 

4. Recitation _ - _ _ "The Rhodora." 

5. Recitation" _ _ _ _ "Boston Hymn." 

(Read in Music Hall, Jan. 1, 1863.) 

6. Recitation - - - - - "Boston." 

(Read in Faneuil Hall, on Dec. 16, 1873, the Centennial 
Anniversary of the Destruction of the Tea in Boston 
Harbor.) 

7. Singing - "Hymn." 

Sung at the Second Church, Boston, at the ordination of 
.Rev. Chandler Bobbins. 



EEFEEENCE BOOKS. 



A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson. By J. Elliot Cabot. 
Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson. By Oliver W. Holmes. Boston: Hough- 
ton, Mifflin & Co. 

The Correspondence of Thcs. Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson.- 
Edited by C. E. Norton. Boston: Ticknor & Co. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson, his Life, Writings and Philosophy.. 
By Geo. Willis Cooke. Boston: Ticknor & Co. 

Homes and Haunts of our Elder Poets. By R. H. Stoddard.. 
New York: D. Appleton & Co. 

Poets' Homes. Second Series. By Arthur Oilman and Others. 
Chicago and Boston: The Interstate Publishing Co. 

Emerson's Home Life. By Louise Alcott. Youth's Companion. 
May 25, 1882. 

Bibliography and List of Writings on Emerson. Literary World. 
May, 1880. 

Index to Familiar Passages. Literary World, July 15, 1882. 



(18) 



[Copyright, 1888, by S. E. Wmchell & Co.] 

EVENTS IN THE LIFE OF HOLMES, 

CHRONOLOGICALLY ARRANGED. 



Born at Cambridge, Mass., - August 29, 1809. 

Graduated from Harvard - - - 1829. 

Studied law 1829. 

Abandoned law for medicine . •- - 1830. 

Went to Europe to study medicine - - 1833. 

Published bis first book of poems - - 1836. 

Appointed Professor of Anatomy and Physiology 

in Dartmouth* College - - - 1838. 

Married Amelia Lee Jackson ... 1840. 

Appointed Professor of Anatomy and Physiology 

in Harvard College .... 1847. 

Pubhshed "Astrsea, and other Poems" - 1850. 

Began "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," 

in the Atlantic Monthly - - - 1857. 

Published "The Professor at the Breakfast Table" 

in the Atlantic .... 1859. 

Pubhshed "The Poet at the Breakfast Table" - 1860. 

" "Elsie Vernier" - - - 1861. 

" "Songs in Many Keys" - - 1864. 

"The Guardian Angel" - - 1868. 

" "Songs of Many Seasons" - - 1874. 

Was given a "Breakfast" in honor of his seven- 
tieth birthday by the publishers of the 

Atlantic Monthly .... 1879. 

Pubhshed "The Iron Gate and other Poems" - 1880. 

Eetired from Harvard - - - - 1882. 

Published "Ealph Waldo Emerson" in American 

Men of Letters Series - - - 1885. 

Visited England 1886. 

Published "One Hundred Days in Europe" - 1887.. 

Lives on Beacon Street, Boston - - - 1888. 

Mrs. Holmes died - • - February 6, 1888.. 

(19) 



10. 

11. 

12. 
13. 
14. 

15. 
16. 
17. 



Music. 

Eecitation. 

Eeading. 

Eecitation. 

Eeading. 

Eecitation. 

Eeading. 

Eecitation. 

Eeading. 

Eecitation 

Eeading. 

Eecitation. 

Eeading. 

Eecitation. 

Chain of Q 

Eeading. 

Song. 



peogeamme no. 1. 

"Hymn for the Class Meeting.'* 

"Our Autocrat." 

Sketch of Holmes, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. 

"The Height of the Eicliculous." 

- Sketch of Holmes, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13. 

"The Living Temple." 

Sketch of Holmes, 15-25. 

"The Deacon's Masterpiece." 

- Sketch of Holmes, 27. 

"Contentment." 

- Sketch of Holmes, 29, 30. 
From "The Hunt after the Captain." 

Sketch of Holmes, 32, 33, 34, 35. 

- "The Chambered Nautilus." 

UOTATIONS. 

Sketch of Holmes, 38. 
"Parting Hymn.'* 
(Tune, Dundee.) 



PEOGEAMME NO. 2. 

1. Song. - - "Welcome to the Nations.'* 

(Quartette.) 

2. Eecitation. - - - "Old Ironsides." 
S. Eeading. - - - Holmes the Poet. 
•4. Eecitation. "Grandmother's Story of Bunker Hill." 
S. Eecitation. - - - "Our Yankee Girls." 
€. Concert Eecitation. - "The Flower of Liberty." 

(Let six pupils recite the verses, the school an- 
swering with the refrain. It well make it more 
effective if the six have flags.) 

7. Song. - - - "Union and Liberty." 

(Song and Chorus.) 

8. Eeading. - - - Holmes the Professor. 

9. Eecitation. - - - "The Promise." 

10. Prose Selections. 1. "Conversation." 2. "The 

Front-door and Side-door to our Feelings." 

11. Eecitation. . . . . "The Boys." 

12. Song. - "The Old Time is the Best Time." 



(20) 



OLIVEE W. HOLMES. 



August 29, 1809. 
Make on the board, back of the desk, a stencil por- 
trait of Dr. Holmes, with fac simile of his hand-writing. 
Below print in fancy lettering : 



poet, professor, " Beloued pi)y^i<:^laT). " 
August 29, 1809. August 29, 1889. 

On a scroll, which may be quickly made with a sten- 
cil, write the following : 

Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. 
Professor at the Breakfast Table. 
Poet at the Breakfast Table. 
Elsie Venner. 
Tiie Guardian Angel. 
Songs in Many Keys. 
Medical Works. 
A Mortal Antipathy. 
One Hundred Days in Europe. 
On the board, at one side of the rostrum, let one who 
can draw make a sketch of the " old gambrel-roofed 
house," from the picture in the Holmes Leaflets. Below 
write : 

Birthplace - - - Cambridge. 

On the other side make a sketch of the "study," 
from Brown's Life of Holmes, and write below : 
Home - - ... Boston. 

Place another picture on a large easel near where the 
speakers v/ill stand. Throw a silken scarf over one cor- 
ner or twine it with smilax. 

(21) 



PEOGEAMME. 



1. At the hour appointed let the school sing Dr. 
Holmes' "Hymn for the Class Meeting," to "Old Hun- 
dred." 

2. The president announces that they have come to 
do honor to Oliver Wendell Holmes, and, as if in answer 
to a toast, a young lady may rise and repeat these words 
from Whittier's poem at the "Holmes Breakfast:" 

Our Autocrat. 
"Long may he live to sing for us 

His sweetest songs at evening time, 
And like his Chambered Nautilus, 

To holier heights of beauty climb ! 

Though now unnumbered guests surround 

The table that he rules at will, 
Its Autocrat, however crowned, 

Is but our friend and comrade still. 

The world may keep his honored name, 

The wealth of all his varied powers ; 
A stronger claim has love than fame, 

And he himself is only ours!" 

3. In a quaint old gambrel-roofed house, but re- 
cently removed from Cambridge Common, Oliver Wendell 
Holmes was born, on the 29th of August, 1809. The 
house has historic associations, having been the head- 
quarters of the American army during the siege of Bos- 
ton. "It was a great happiness," writes the Poet at the 
Breakfast Table, "to have been born in an old house 
haunted by such recollections, with harmless ghosts 
walking its corridors. The worst of a modern, stylish 
mansion is that it has no place for ghosts." 

4. His father, the Eev. Abiel Holmes, was the pas- 
tor of the "First Church" of Cambridge. Here he minis- 

(22) 



OLIVER W. HOLMES. 23 

tered to his parish for forty years, revered and loved by 
all who knew him. He was a man of marked literary 
ability — "full of learning," as some one has said, "but 
never distressing others by showing how learned he was." 

5. His mother T/as a daughter of Hon. Oliver Wen- 
dell, an eminent lawyer, who traced his ancestry back to 
the Olivers, Quinceys, and Bradstreets — names that be- 
longed to the best blue blood of New England. 

6. With such ancestry it is not strange that Dr. 
Holmes says : 

"I go for the man with the family portraits against 
the one with tiie twenty-five cent daguerreotype, unless 
I find out that the last is the better of the two. I go 
for the man that inherits family traditions and the cum- 
ulative humanities of at least four or five generations. 
Above all things, as a child, he should have tumbled 
about in a library. All men are afraid of books that 
have not handled them from infancy." 

7. Dr. Holmes entered Harvard at the age of six- 
teen and throughout his whole college course maintained 
an excellent rank in scholarship. He was a frequent con- 
tributor to the college periodicals, and was the class poet. 
About this time he wrote "The Height of the Eidiculous," 
which is interesting as one of his earlier poems. 

8. Ebcitation - "The Height of the Eidieulous." 
9. After a year's study of law, young Holmes deter- 
mined to take up the study of medicine, which was much 
more congenial to his tastes. He studied for two years 
and a half at home, and then, before taking his degree, 
spent three years in Europe, perfecting his studies in 
the hospitals and lecture-rooms of Paris and Edinburgh, 



24 authors' birthdays. 

His pre-eminence in his profession is doubtless due 
largely to the breadth and thoroughness of his prepa- 
ration. 

10. At the age of thirty, Dr. Holmes was married to 
Amelia Lee Jackson, and the young couple settled in 
Boston, 

11. In 1847, he was appointed Professor of Anat- 
omy and Surgery at Harvard University, which position 
he filled for thirty-five years. 

12. President Eliot, of Harvard, said at the "Holmes 
Breakfast" : "Most of you, perhaps, have the impression 
that Dr. Holmes chiefly enjoys a beautiful couplet, an 
elegant, sentence. It has fallen to me to observe that he 
has other great enjoyments. I have never seen any other 
mortal exhibit such enthusiasm over an elegant dissection. 
And perhaps you think it is the pen with which Dr. 
Holmes is chiefly skillful. I assure you that he is equally 
skillful with scalpel and microscope." 

13. Perhaps it is because of this very familiarity 
with the human frame that Dr. Holmes writes so beauti- 
fully in "The Living Temple." 

14. Ebcitation - - "The Living Temple.'^ 

15. One of the medical students in Dr. Holmes* 
last class says of him: "We always welcomed Dr. 
Holmes with enthusiastic cheers when he came into the 
classroom, and his lectures were so brimful of witty an- 
ecdotes that we sometimes forgot it was a lesson in anat- 
omy we had come to learn. But the instruction, deep, 
sound, and thorough, was there all the same, and we 
never left the room without feeling what a friend of 
knowledge, and what a clear insight upon difficult points 



OLIVEE W. HOLMES. 25- 

in medical science had been imparted through the spark- 
Hng medium !" 

16. Dr. Holmes resigned his position of professor 
in 1882 that he might give his time more exclusively to 
literary pursuits. 

IT. At his last lecture he was presented by his class 
with an exquisite Loving Cup. On one side was the 
happy quotation from his own writings : "Love bless thee, 
Joy crown thee, God speed thy career." 

18. But it is in Holmes the writer that we are 
most interested. When the Atlantic Monthly was started, 
Mr. Lowell took editorial control of it only upon condition 
that his friend, Dr. Holmes, should be one of its chief 
contributors. It was Dr. Holmes, too, who was called 
upon to name the new magazine. 

19. Mr. Howells said at the "Holmes Breakfast" : 
"It was ©liver Wendell Holmes who not only named but 
who made the Atlantic. How did he do this ? Oh, very 
simply! He merely invented a new kind of literature." 

20. This new kind of literature was the series of 
papers called "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," 
which first appeared in the Atlantic. 

21. These papers are filled to the brim with humor, 
pathos, sense, and poetry, and so true are they to human 
nature that one can hardly fail to think in reading them : 
"Why, that's just what I've always thought." 

22. Dr. Holmes' forcible way of picturing a thing 
is shown in his "Three Johns" and "Three Thomases." 
Listen: "There are at least six personalities distinctly 
to be recognized as taking part in that dialogue between 
John and Thomas. 



56 authors' birthdays. 1 

(Let one put the following on the board and explain :) 

'1. The real John, known only to his 
Maker. 
!. John's ideal John, never the real John 
'Three Johns <^ ^^^^ often very unlike him, 

i. Thomas' ideal John, never the real 
John, nor John's John, but often 
very unlike either. 

r 1'. The real Thomas. 
"Three Thomases <^ 2. Thomas' ideal Thomas. 
[3. John's ideal Thomas. 

"Only one of the three Johns is taxed, but the other 
two are just as important. No wonder two disputants 
often get angry when there are six of them talking and 
listening all at the same time." 

23. Dr. Holmes's way of abruptly closing a subject 
by giving it a humorous turn is illustrated by this para- 
graph immediately following the last : 

"A very unphilosophical application of the above re- 
marks was made by a young fellow answering to the 
name of John, who sits near to me at table. A certain 
hasket of peaches, a rare vegetable, little known to 
boarding-houses, was on its way to me via this unlettered 
Johannes. He appropriated the three that remained in 
the basket, remarking that there was just one apiece for 
him. I convinced him that his practical inference was 
hasty and illogical ; but in the meantime he had eaten up 
the peaches." 

24. "The Professor" and "The Poet at the Break- 
fast Table" followed the "Autocrat." 



OLIVER W. HOLMES. 27 

25. Among the poems closing each number of these 
articles in the Atlantic are some of the finest in our 
language. They have since been collected in a volume 
called "Songs in Many Keys." One of the best known 
among them is the "Deacon's Masterpiece." 
26. Kecitation - "The Deacon's Masterpiece." 

27. Dr. Holmes is a natural fun-lover, and conse- 
quently his poems are much sought after at public gath- 
erings. One of his best satires is "Contentment." 
28. Eecitation _ . . "Contentment." 

29. Dr. Holmes has three children, tv^o sons, both 
lawyers, and a daughter, at whose" home at Beverly 
Farms he now passes his summers. 

30. In "The Hunt after the Captain," we have a 
most touching revelation of fatherly love, the "Captain" 
being his son, Oliver W. 

31. Eecitation - "The Hunt after the Captain." 
32. Dr. Holmes' residence on Beacon street is one of 
the most elegant and charming residences on that fash- 
ionable thoroughfare, though far less pretentious than 
many of the others. It is of the view from the broad 
bow window of his study' that he writes : 

"Through my north window in the wintry weather, 

My airy oriel on the river shore, 
I watch the sea-fowl as they flock together, 

Where late the boatman flashed his dripping oar." 

The publishers of the Atlantic celebrated Dr. 
Holmes' seventieth birthday by giving a breakfast in his 
honor. To this about one hundred distinguished guests 
were invited. 



28 AUTHOES' BIRTHDAYS. 

34. From Dr. Holmes's poem, "The Iron Gate," 
given at this time, we have the following : 

"I come not here your morning hours to sadden, 

A limping pilgrim leaning on his staff, 
I who have never deemed it sin to gladden 
This vale of sorrow with a wholesome laugh. 

If word of mine another's gloom has brightened, 
Through my dumb lips the heaven-sent message came; 

If hand of mine another's task has lightened, 
It felt the guidance that it dare not claim." 

35. Dr. Holmes is often thought of only as a hu- 
morist, but one says of him : 

^'When the world forgets the sallies that have set ta- 
bles in a roar, Holmes's picture of the ship of pearl will 
preserve his name forever." 
36. Eecitation - "The Chambered Nautilus." 

CHAIN OF QUOTATIONS. 

1. "Talk about those subjects you have had long 
in your mind and listen to what others say about sub- 
jects you have studied but recently. Knowledge and 
timber shouldn't be much used until they are seasoned." 

2. "If you have the consciousness of genius, Jo 
something to prove it." 

3. "A thought is often original though you have 
uttered it a hundred times. It has come k> you by a new 
route, by a new and express train of associations." 

4r. "One-story intellects, two -story intellects, three- 
story intellects with sky-lights." 

5. "The wider the intellect the larger and simpler 
the expressions in which its knowledge is embodied." 

6. "Unpretending mediocrity is good, and genius is 



OLIVER W. HOLMES. 29 

glorious, but a weak flavor of genius in an essentially 
common person is detestable." 

7. "Don't flatter yourself that friendship author- 
izes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. 
On the contrary, the nearer you come into relation with 
a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy be- 
come." 

8. "At thirty we are all trying to cut our names in 
big letters upon the walls of this tenement of life, twenty 
years later we have carved it or shut up our jack-knives," 

(Other good ones may be found on every page.) 
38. At seventy-nine Dr. Holmes' literary vigor still 
continues. In the words of Mark Twain at the "Break- 
fast,'' "May it be a very long time yet before any one can 
truthfully say of him, He is growing old." 
39. Song — by the school - "Parting Hymn." 

(Tune — Dundee.) 



REFERENCE BOOKS. 

Oliver Wendell Holmes. By W. S/ Kennedy. Boston: S. B. Cas- 

sino & Co. 
Life of Holmes. By E. E. Brown. Boston: D. Lothrop Company. 
Poets'' Homes. Boston: Interstate Publishing Co. 
Homes and Haunts of our Elder Poets. By R. H. Stoddard. New 

York: D. Appleton & Co. 

Riverside Literature Series No. 6. Holmes' Leaflets. Boston: 
Houghton, Miflain & Co. 



[Copyright, 1888, by S. R. Winchell & Co.J 

EVENTS IN THE LIFE OF WILL CARLETON. 

CHRONOLOGICALLY ARRANGED. 



Born near Hudson, Michigan - Oct. 24, 1845. 

Entered Hillsdale College - . . - 1865. 

Wrote "Fax" 1868. 

Began lecturing - - - - - ' - 1868. 

Graduated from Hillsdale College - - 1869. 

Published "Betsey and I are Out" - - 1871. 

" "Farm Ballads" - .- - 1873. 

" "Farm Legends" - - - - 1875. 

" "Young Folks' Centennial Rhymes" 1876. 

" "Farm Festivals" - - - 1881. 

Moved to the East 1880. 

Married 1882. 

Lectured in England . . . . . 1884. 

Published "City Ballads" - - - 1885. 

Visited Europe - 1887. 

Lives in Brooklyn .... 1888. 



PROGRAMME. 



1. Singing - - "Michigan, My Michigan. " 

2. Reading .... Carleton tlie Writer. 

3. Recitation - - . "Betsey and I ; re Out." 

4. Recitation - "How Betsey and I Made Up." 

5. Music - - - "Cover them Over." 

6. Reading - - - Carleton the Lecturer, 

7. Recitation - - - " 'Tis Snowing." 

8. Recitation - "Over the Hills to the Poor-house." 

9. Recitation "Over the Hills from the Poor-house." 

10. Recitation - "The First Settler's Story." 

11. Music 

(30) 



WILL CAELETON. 



October 21, 1845. 



PEOGEAMME NO. 1. 

1. Music - - "Michigan, my Michigan." 

2. Sketch - - - Carleton the Writer. 

Years ago, there came to the wilcls of Michigan a New 
Hampshire farmer, intent upon making a home. The 
home was found in the southern part of the state, the 
farm was cleared by the farmer's own hands, and there 
in the wilderness was set up a New England household. 
Into this home came five children, the youngest of whom 
is the subject of this sketch. 

Will Carleton was born October 24, 1845, on his- 
father's farm near Hudson, Lenawee Co., Michigan. 

The father, who was a devoted Methodist, was a man 
of sterling worth, esteemed by his neighbors and useful 
in the community. His wife was a fit companion for 
such a husband, and, it is said, found time amid the 
cares of pioneer life to sing her own little songs, and 
perhaps to give of her own tastes to her yougest born. 

The boy passed his youth aftpr the manner of country 
boys and had, it appeared at first, only the country boy's 
hope of an education — a district school. This, how- 
ever, failed to satisfy his ambition, and after a taste of 
Latin, algebra, and geometry, self taught, he resolutely 
trudged five miles a day through Michigan mud and 
snow to attend the high school. When the high school 
course was finished, like Oliver Twist, he still called for 

(31) 



32 AUTHOES' BIRTHDAYS. 

*'more." But more the hard- working farmer, his father, 
though wiUing, could not give, and the J^oung man, in- 
tent upon a college education, had recourse to that most 
convenient of callings — teaching. 

Teaching school at four dollars a week is not a very 
lucrative business, but it pays largely in experience, 
and by strict economy, which was worth more to' him 
than he understood at the time, it enabled Will Carleton 
to enter Hillsdale College at the age of twenty. He was 
graduated from this institution four years later, in 1869, 
delivering at this time his poem, "Eifts in the Clouds," 
which was favorably received by the people and press of 
the state. "Cover them Over, " written one year later 
for Decoration Day, has been recited on Decoration Day 
all over the country ever since. 

Daring his college days Mr, Carleton had been in the 
habit of sending occasional poems to the newspapers of 
the state and even to the Chicago papers. Some of these 
had attracted the attention of the editor of a small pa- 
per in Chicago, and he offered Mr. Carleton a position 
on his journal at the modest salary of twelve dollars a 
week. After a short connection with this paper he re- 
turned to Hillsdale where he ha d been offered a better 
position. , 

His first decided success in literature was achievedin 
1871 in the publication of "Betsey and I are Out." It ap- 
peared first in The Toledo Blade, and, says Mr. Trow- 
bridge : "Young authors who have their laurels as well 
as their livings to gain may be consoled to learn that it 
was sent to that paper as a gratuitous contribution. The 
writer was so little known that he did not deem it wise 



WILL CAELETON. 33 

to diminish the chances of his venture by freighting it 
with a fixed price. Its success was immediate and phe- 
nomenal. It was copied into newspapers all over the 
country; public readers took it up, and it was soon 
heard recited, more or less badly, from every lyceum 
platform; and while people were inquiring, 'Who is the' 
author ?' individuals never heard from before or since 
eooly stepped forward and claimed it." 

It attracted the notice of the editor of Harper's Week- 
ly, who asked permission to publish it with illustrations, 
and requested something more from the pen of its author. 
Of the origin of this poem Mr. Carleton says : "I was 
much impressed by the great prevalence of divorces, and 
would often stray into our court-room and hear the tes- 
timony in the various cases. It was here that I heard 
and saw the domestic troubles of others, and they gave 
me the idea of "Betsey and I are Out." 

It was followed by the sequel, "How Betsey and I 
Made Up," "Over the Hills to- the Poor-house," "Gone 
with a Handsomer Man," "Out of the Old House, Nancy," 
and others. They were so well received that in 1873 
they, with some of his earher productions, were collected 
in a volume entitled "Farm Ballads," and published, 
with illustrations, by the Harpers. The book met with 
an enormous sale for a book of poems and was followed 
in 1875 by "Farm Legends," a collection of similar 
character. 

A year later appeared "Young Folks' Centennial 
Ehymes," which has been severely criticised as bearing 
evidence of inexcusable haste in preparation. "Farm 
Festivals," the third of the "Farm" series, was published 



34 AUTHOES' BIRTHDAYS. 

in 1881, and was followed in 1885 by "City Ballads.'*' 
This completes the list of Mr. Carleton's published 
poems, with the exception of a thin volume of his youth- 
ful productions printed at his own expense, after he had 
interviewed a score of publishers unsuccessfully. 

Soon after the appearance of "Betsey and I are Out," 
Mr. Carleton retired from editorial work in order to de- 
vote himself to authorship, study, and travel, and in 
1880 removed to the East where two years later he was 
married. 

He livesin a pleasantthree-story brown stone house 
in Brooklyn, with his accomplished wife and the mother 
who is justly proud of him. The father died after living 
to see his son, the only living one of the five children, 
achieve a reputation, 

Mr. Carleton's study is in an upper chamber where,, 
undisturbed, he devotes his mornings to writing. "He 
rises early, never composes before breakfast, thinks over 
his subjects carefully, and then when the work is in mind, 
writes out of a full heart. Of his methods of work he 
says : "I do not dash off my lines. They do not come 
to me hastily. The 'construction of a poem with me is a 
labor of care, and is often slow work." 

We have some indication of his genial nature in the 
following in regard to the comparative merits of private 
and hotel entertainment : 

"Some lecturers prefer goinginvariably to ahotel ; but- 
I must confess that I much enjoy the occasional hospi- 
tality of a private family. They generally prove to be 
pleasant, intellectual, cordial friends, who introduce the 
weary wayfarer to cosy parlors, music, flowers, and often 



WILL CAELETON. 35 

pretty and well-trained children. They are usually con- 
tent to let him talk much or little, as he may wish, and, 
on the whole, make him a temporary member of the fam- 
ily, if he will let them — which, if he is at all genial, he 
certainly feels inclined to do." 

Of his physique andcharacfceristics, Mrs. Bolton, in 
her "Famous American Authors," writes: "Mr. Carle- 
ton is a tall, vigorous-looking man, who believec in out- 
door exercise, especially walking, who is fond of rowing, 
sailing, and horseback riding, who uses no stimulants, 
who is kindly in manner yet decided in character, who 
honors womanhood, and all that is pure and elevating, 
who is fond of music, playing on several instruments, and 
who lives in and enjoys such a home as he describes in 
'City Ballads :' 

'A home that rejoices in love's saving leaven, 

Comes deliciously nigh to the splendors of heaven.' " 

Of his work she says : "He has touched the hearts 
of the people as few others have done. He has made 
home and home affections sweeter to thousands ; he has 
written with a desire to make the world purer and bet- 
ter — infinitely above writing merely 'for art's sake ;' he 
has spoken with his warm, earnest heart to the people, 
and the people have made answer." 

3. Eecitation. - - "Betsey and I are Out. '* 

4. Eecitation. . - "How Betsey and I Made Up." 

5. Music. ... "Cover Them Over." 

6. Beading. - - Garleton the Lecturer. 
For the last twenty years Mr. Carleton has been before 

the public, not only as a poet but as a lecturer. This 
occupation, begun in the first instance to eke out his 



SQ authors' biethdays. 

scanty funds sufficiently to enable iiim to complete liis 
college course, in time became a lucrative business, and 
led him ont of liis little circle in southern Miclii(7an, 
through the cities of this country and England; and still 
occupies much of his time and talent. The story is told 
best in his own words : 

"My lecturing efforts began at home upon my father's 
farm. Having succeeded in hearing two or three good 
speakers who had visited our httle neighboring village, I 
decided straightway that forensic effort was to be part of 
my life-business. So the sheep and cattle were obliged 
to hear various emotional opinions on subjects of more 
or less importance, and our steeds of the plough enjoyed 
a great many comfortable rests between furiows, in order 
to 'assist' at my rhetorical displays. One of them per- 
sisted in always going to sleep before the discourse was 
finished ; a custom that is not obsolete even among his 
human superiors. 

"The first lecture course of this series came to an end 
quite suddenly, for my shrewd, hard-headed New Eng- 
land father began to suspect that agriculture was being 
sacrificed to eloquence. So he appeared unexpectedly 
in the audience during a matinee, and told me he had 
heai'd most of the harangue, anc? that he feared I was 
spoiling a tolerably good farmer to become an intoler- 
ably bad orator. Though of a kindly, gonerous disposi- 
tion, he could throw into his less gracious words a great 
deal of sarcasm to the square inch, and the lecturer of 
the afternoon crushed, but not convinced, wakened the 
off horse, and thoughtfully drove his plough towards the 
blue woods at the other end of the furrow. It is a pleasant 



WILL CARLETON. 37" 

memory that my father lived to see me earning a hun- 
dred dollars a night, and admitted with a grave twinkle 
in his eye, that, having looked the matter over from a 
non-agricultural standpoint, he had concluded there was 
more in me than he had supposed. 

"But in those boy-days, both lecturing and Liexiit Lire 
developed very slowly. Hovv^ was I to get audiences, 
either for pen or voice ? The harvest v/as ripe, but there 
were great reapers thundering up and down the neld 
and warning me, with my poor little siclde, to keep out 
of the way. There seemed little hope for a beginner. 

"But the great secret, of commencing is to commence 
zvhere one can. During my course in college, it appeared 
that several small towns in the country which could not 
afford expensive lectures, wanted, and would pay for 
something to amuse them for an evening ; that there ex- 
isted among these people a class who were tired of burnt 
cork and sleight-of-hand shows, and wanted something 
that professed to be intellectual ; and so I 'did' all the 
neighboring hamlets that I could induce to hear me." 

It must have been abouu this time tliat he had the 
following experience as told by Mr. Trowbiiugo : 

"During his 'Junior' vacation in the summer of 1S68, 
he wrote at Aurora, 111., a poem for the political campaign, 
entitled 'Fax.' For an impartial test of its merits, and 
perhaps also, to save himself from, humiliation in case of 
failure, he first read it to an audience in a neighboring 
town where he was unknown. Only about a dozen per- 
sons were present, and it was noticeable that instead of 
competing for the front seats, they exhibited some wari- 
ness in keeping near the door, from which escape from 



38 authors' birthdays. 

too heavy an infliction of poetry might be possible with- 
out disturbing the meeting. So far from quietly stealing 
away, however, they remained to tender the reader a 
vote of thanks, and the result was that the poem was 
not only repeated the next night to a crowded house, but 
became widely popular throughout the campaign," 

Mr. Carleton says of these early efforts : "The finan- 
cial advantages were not bewildering, and generally con= 
sisted of half the net proceeds. After the door-keeper 
had had his percentage, and the sexton his guerdon, 
and the printer his dues, and the bill-poster his back- 
pay, the half of what was left was almost as much as 
the whole of it (although even then, perhaps, worth as 
much as the entertainment.) 

"But the practice of meeting audiences of all descrip- 
tions has proved invaluable ever since. Declaiming upon 
the sea-shore would have been a tender, mild sort of 
discipline compared to it. Mothers brought their babies 
and they competed with me for a hearing. Most of the 
cheering, if done at all, came from the leathern-clad 
palm of the foot, rather than from the softly sonorous 
surface of the hand. But these country people had as 
good hearts and as healthy brains as can be found in city 
or university, and I always went away in love with my 
audience. 'You have let considerable light into this dis- 
trict,' said one bright-eyed farmer boy, 'and you've 
started me on the up track.' My payment for that even- 
ing's work was five dollars and a half in money, and a 
compliment estimated at at least a milli'on dollars. 

"My resources from the platform slowly increased 
and finally resulted in enough to pay a fair portion of the 



WILL CAELETON. 39 

expenses of a college course. Soon after graduation I be- 
gan to receive calls from various towns in the state, 
which were becoming acquainted with me through my 
literary work. This soon extended to adjoining states 
and so all over this country and England, and gave me 
some very interesting experiences and many first-class 
exhibits of human nature." 

Speaking of the amusing incidents which occur in 
traveling, he says : "People often talk over your last book 
. or lecture with charming frankness and thoroughness, 
not knowing that their theme is in the car-seat immedi- 
ately behind them enveloped in great coat and traveling 
hat, and not looking at all as he looked on the platform. 
In such cases you cannot help over-hearing, for the rail- 
road tone is a loud one ; and you get some very refresh- 
ing pieces of criticism which will benefit you if permitted. 

"Sometimes you have the pleasure of being discussed 
with yourself. A very pretty young lady dropped daint- 
ily one evening into the empty car-seat beside me. She 
seemed mentally disturbed concerning something, and 
finally asked me if our train was on time. I was obhged 
to tell her that it was about an hour late. She gave a 
little sigh,- and remarked, 'I am so sorry ! Will Carleton 
is to lecture in our town to-night, and I wanted to get 
home in time to hear him ! ' I replied that I believed 
an arrangement had been made that he was not to com- 
mence his lecture until the arrival of our train. At this 
she nestled cosily into the seat and appeared quite con- 
tented. . But after a few miles of silence, she asked me 
if I had ever heard him. I replied, <Yes, several times.' 
""And how did you like him ?' she asked. I was obliged 



40 



AUTHORS BIETHDAYS. 



to reply that I had seen a great many lecturers whom I 
had enjoyed better. At this she glanced at me with a. 
kind of 'mean old thing' expression of face, and there 
was a perceptible coldness between us. But she soon, 
melted again sufficiently to ask me all sorts of interest- 
ing questions concerning myself, which I answered blush- 
ingiy, as well as I could. I had much to do to repress 
my laughter, and still more upon seeing her in the audi- 
ence an hour or two later with a very bewildered expres- 
sion upon her comely face." 

Mr. Carleton's lectures are generally interspersed 
with selections from his o^vn poems. As to the contin- 
uance of these lectures, he says : "I am often impor- 
tuned by my near and dear friends to cease the exacting 
and fatiguing platform work, and devote myself entirely 
to home comfort and literary work. I have often half 
promised to do so; but the other half of the promise 
still lingers, meshed in the fascinations of brilliant audi- 
ences, meetings face to face with dear and appreciative 
readers, and close and beneficial studies of genuine hu- 
man nature. I intend to give it up very soon, indeed :: 
but — exactly how soon I can't really find the heart to say." 

" 'Tis Snowing."' 
(For two voices.) 

"Over the Hills to the Poor-house." 

"Over the Hills from the Poor-house." 

"The First Settler's Story." 

EEPERENCB BOOKs! 
Famoim American Authors. By Sarah K. Bolton. New Yorkt 

T. Y. CroweU & Co. 
Harper's Magazine, Vol.68, page 572. (March, 1884.) 



7. 


Eecitation 


8. 

9. 
10. 
11. 


Eecitation, 
Eecitation 
Eecitation 

Music 



[Copyright, 1888, by S. R, WinclieU & Co.] 

EVENTS IN THE LIFE OF WHITTIEE. 

CHRONOLOGICALLY ARRANGED. 



Born at Haverhill, Mass., - - Dec, IT, 180T 
Went to school to Mr. Coffin - - - 1814 
Sent his first poem to Mr. Garrison's paper - 1826 
Went to Haverhill Academy . . . . 1827 
Eemoved to Boston and engaged in journalism - 1828 
Edited The New England Weekly Review, Hart- 
ford, Conn. - 1830 

Published " Legends of New England " - - 1831 
Was Secretary of the National Anti-Slavery Con- 
vention at Philadelphia - - - 1833 
Was member of Massachusetts State Legislature 1835 
Edited the Haverhill Gazette - - - - 1836 
Edited the Pennsylvania Freeman - - - 1838 
Eemoved to Amesbury - . . . . 1840 
Published "Voices of Freedom" - - 1833-1848 
" "LeavesfromMargarieSmith's Journal" 1849 
" his " Poems " First edition - - 1849 
" his "Poems," Second edition - 1857 

His sister Elizabeth died - - - - 1864 

Pubhshed " Snow Bound " - - - 1866 

Pubhshed "The Tent on the Beach" - - 1867 
Was given a dinner by the publishers of the Atlan- 
tic Monthly in honor of his seventieth 
birthday, Dec. 17 - - - - 1877 
Eeceived degree of Doctor of Laws from Harvard 

University 1886 

Celebration of his eightieth birthday with congratu- 
latory letters from North and South, Dec. 
17, 1887 

(41) 



PROGEAMME No. 1. 



1. Singing 

2. Reading 

3. Recitation 
4- Reading 

5. Song 

6. Reading 

7. Recitation 

8. Recitation 

9. Reading 

10. Song 

11. Recitation 

12. Reading 

13. Recitation 

14. Recitation 

15. Recitation 

16. Song 

17. Recitation 
18. 

19. Song - 



Hymn by J. G. Whittier. 

Whittier tlie Boy. 

" In Schooldays." 

Whittier's Home. 

" Lingering Memories." 

Wliittier the Youth. 

" The Changehng." 

- " Skipper Ireson's Ride." 

Whittier the Writer and Reformer. 

"Laus Deo." 

" Barbara Frietchie." 

Whittier the Man. 

- "Maud MuUer." 

- '- - - ''The Sisters." 

" The Three Bells." 

• The Good Ship " Three Bells." 

" King Volmer and Elsie." 

Chain of Quotations. 

" Centennial Hymn." 



PROGRAMME No. 2. 



1. Music. 

2. Reading - Whittier's Life, (Prepared by a pupil 

or read from Whittier Leaflets.) 

3. Recitation . . - - "The Pumpkin." 

4. Recitation - A Picture of Farm Life, from the 

prelude to "Among the Hills," beginning "Still 
I know too well," and ending with "And hugged 
his rags in self-complacency." 

(42J 



WHITTIER. 43 

5. Song - - - " Negro Boatman's Song." 

(L. 0. Emerson.) 

6. Beading - Wliittier's Home (Poets' Homes.) 

7. Song - - - " The Old Oaken Bucket." 

8. Eecitation - - - - " Mary Garvin." 

9. Eecitation - " The Wreck of Ri vermouth." 

10. Anecdotes of Whittier. 

11. Recitation . . - - " Mabel Martin." 

12. Recitation - - - "The Two Rabbis." 

13. Music 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 
Dec. 17, 1807. 



Hang a large picture of Whittier on the wall behind 
the desk. Cover large paste-board letters and figures 
with evergreen and place them in a semi-circle above, 
so as to form the words : " Our Quaker Poet." 

Make a list of his works below on a scroll, an open 
book, or some other device, made with a stencil. On 
one side of the picture put the date 1807; on the other 
the present year. [If the school authorities forbid tack- 
ing letters to the walls, make the same arrangement in 
large fancy lettering on the board.] 

Space the boards, and let all pupils who will do so 
select spaces in which to write their favorite quotations. 
These may be left until the boards are needed. 

Pictures of Mr. Whittier's home may be drawn from 
stencils which can be obtained of S. C. Clark & Co., 
New York. 



44 . authors' birthdays. 

PEOGEAMME No. 1. 



1. Singing - - - Hymn by J. G. Whittier» 

(Tune — " InTitation," or any CM. tune.) 

" We may not climb the heaTenly steeps 

To bring the Lord Christ down; 

In vain we search the lowest deeps. 

For him no depths can drown. 

But warm, sweet, tender, even yet 

A present help is he; 
And faith has yet its Olivet, 

And love its Galilee. 

The healing of the seamless dress 

Is by our beds of pain ; 
We touch him in life's throng and press. 

And we are whole again. 

Through him the first fond prayers are said 

Our lips of childhood frame; 
The last, low whispers of our dead 

Are burdened with his name." 

2. Eeading - - - - Whittier the Boy. 

In the extreme northeastern corner of Massachu- 
setts, seventeen miles from where the Merrimac, after 
changing its mind in a crazy fashion, empties into the 
sea, is the town of Haverhill. 

Three miles from the town is an old farm-honse with 
nothing to distinguish it from many other New England 
farm-houses except that it is the birthplace of the poet 
"Whittier. Here^ in the home so graphically described in 
" Snow-bound," he passed his boyhood, guided and con- 
trolled by the firm hand of a father whom he describes 
as '* a prompt, decisive man, wasting no breath,"— 



WHITTIER. 45 

watched over and trained by a mother whose religious 
nature and abounding charity have left their impress on 
her son. 

In the old brown school-house presided over by 
Joshua Coffin he went to school. He has written a poem 
to Mr. Coffin, in which he says : 

" I, the urchin unto whom, 
In that smoked and dingy room, 
Where the district gave thee rule 
O'er its ragged winter school, 
Thou didst teach the mysteries 
Of those weary A B C's." 

From which we are led to think that "A B C's" are 
as tiresome to poets as to other small boys, A school- 
mate of his tells us that in this same school, young 
Whittier passed much time in writing verses, to the sad 
neglect of his sums. 

He has made the old school-house familiar to us in 
his little poem, "In School-days." 

3. Eecitation - - - - " In School-days." 

4. Eeading - Whittier's Home, Adapted from 

" Snow-bound." 

5. Song - "Lingering Memories." — D. F. Hodges. 

6. Eeading - . . . Whittier the Youth. 

There seems to have been little in the home reading 
of our poet to stimulate a literary taste. In these days 
of public libraries, of Youth's Companio7is and Wide 
Aioakes, of Trowbridges and Coffins, and "Young Folks* 
Eeading Circles," we can hardly imagine how little there 
was for a boy to read seventy years ago. The Whittier 
library consisted of "scarce a score" of books and 



4:6 authors' birthdays. 

pamphlets, all told, among them "Pilgrim's Progress,'*' 
"Lindley Murray's Eeader," and 

" One harmless novel mostly hid 
From younger eyes, a book forbid, 
And poetry (or good or bad, 
A single book was all we had.)" 

In addition to these they had the almanac and the 
weekly newspaper — scant food, one would think, on which 
to nourish poetical genius. While still a boy Whittier 
purchased from a peddler a copy of Burns's poems which 
he read and re-read until he knew them by heart. He 
says that Burns opened his eyes to the beauty in homely 
things and his critics trace many of his characteristics 
to the influence of the Scotch poet. 

With so few books to read he grew up reading the 
one great book open to rich and poor, and the hills, the 
sea, all things in nature, opened to him their secrets. 
He drank in eagerly the traditions of the time and place 
to reproduce them years afterward in his legends and 
witch tales. Some one has said that if the history of 
New England should be lost it could be reconstructed 
from Whittier's works. 

7. Eecitation - - - " The Changeling.'*' 

8. Eecitation - - " Skipper Ireson's Eide." 

9. Eeading - Whittier the Writer and Eeformer. 
Mr. Whittier's introduction to the world of letters 

was in this way : When nineteen years of age he sent 
a poem written with blue ink on coarse paper to the Free 
Press, a paper edited by Wm. Lloyd Garrison. Mr. Gar- 
rison found it under his door where it had been put by 
the postman, and his first impulse was to throw it into 



WHITTIBR. 4T 

the waste-basket. He decided, however, to read it, was 
impressed with the marks of genius it bor§, and pub- 
hshed it a few weeks later. 

The young poet, in the meantime, was in suspense 
as to its fate. He was in the field with his uncle one 
day, mending the stone wall, when the postman came by 
and threw him the weekly paper. With a beating heart 
he tore off the wrapper — ^there was his poem. This, of 
course, encouraged him to send other poems to the same 
paper, and so impressed was Mr. Garrison with them that 
he inquired of the postman who it was that was sending 
him contributions from Bast Haverhill. The postman 
said it was " a young farmer named Whittier," and Gar- 
rison decided to ride over on horse-back, a distance of 
fifteen miles, to see his contributor. When he reached 
the farm Whittier was in the field, and when told that 
there was a gentleman at the house who wanted to see 
him, the young poet felt very much like "breaking for 
the brush," no one having ever called on him in this way 
before. However, he slipped in at the back door, made 
his toilet and met his visitor, who told him that he had 
power as a writer, and urged him to improve his talents. 
The father came in during the conversation and asked 
young Garrison not to put such ideas into the mind of 
his son, as they would only unfit him for his home duties. 
But, fortunately, it was too late ! 

He went soon after to the Haverhill Academy, where 
he remained several years, sending contributions from 
time to time to different papers. 

In 1828 he went to Boston to study, but soon en- 
gaged in journalism, being invited to take editorial 



48 authors' birthdays. 

control of one paper after another. When the invitation 
came for him to take charge of the New England Review, 
of Hartford, in the absence of the editor, George D. 
Prentice, he says, himself, that he could not have been 
more utterly astonished if he had been appointed prime 
minister to the Kahn of Tartary. 

Thus a brilliant career was opening up before our 
poet ; but a cause more urgent than personal fame was 
calling for him. About this time the Anti-slavery move- 
ment was taking active shape in conventions and Anti- 
slavery papers and societies. Abolitionism was an un- 
popular thing North or South. For Mr. Whittier to 
identify himself with it was literary suicide ; to fail to 
do so' was to stifle his sense of right and justice. Being 
a conscientious man, right and justice prevailed, and for 
years he gave all his influence to the cause. So unpopu- 
lar did this make him that he says that for twenty years 
his name would have injured the circulation of any liter- 
ary or political journal in the country. 

It was not unusual in those days for Abolitionists 
to be mobbed for expressing their views, and Mr. "Whit- 
tier tells of an experience of this kind in Concord, 
N. H. 

He had gone there with a Mr. Thompson, an Eng- 
lishman, to hold an Abolition meeting, and the people 
determined to prevent it. They were set upon by a mob 
as they went down the street and only escaped by taking 
refuge with an honorable man, who refused to give them 
up, though not himself an Abolitionist. It was, fortu- 
nately, a bright moonlight night, and about two o'clock 
the two gentlemen escaped by driving off rapidly to 



WHITTIER. 49 

Haverhill. Some time after sunrise they stopped at a 
wayside inn to rest their horse and get breakfast. While 
they were at the table the landlord said : 

" They 're having a time of it down at Haverhill." 

"How is that?" 

" Oh, one of them blamed Abolitionists was lecturin' 
there ; be had been invited to the town by a young fel- 
low named Whittier, but they made it pretty hot for 
them, and I guess neither he nor Whittier will be in a 
liurry to repeat the thing." 

"What kind of a fellow is this Whittier?" 

"Oh, he's an ignorant sort of a fellow; he don't 
know much." 

"And who is this Thompson they're talking 
about ?" 

" Why he is the man sent over here by the British to 
make trouble with our government." 

As the two friends were stepping into the buggy, 
Mr. Whittier, with one foot on the step, turned and said 
to the host, who was standing by with several tavern 
loafers : — 

"You've been talking about Thompson and Whittier. 
This is Mr. Thompson and I am Whittier. Good morn- 
ing." " And jumping into the buggy," said the poet, 
with a twinkle in his eye, " we whipped up and stood 
not on the order of our going." 

Everybody knows the power of a cry (a song like 
" John Brown's body " or a pithy sentence or phrase) in 
any great movement. There can be no doubt that Whit- 
tier's poems did as much toward bringing about the 
abolition of slavery as Garrison's editorials. ♦ 



50 authors' birthdays. 

10. Singing " Laus Deo."^^ 

(Song and Chorus by F. Boott.) 

11. Eecitation - - - " Barbara Frietchie." 

12. Beading - - - - Whittier the Man. 
In 1840 Mr. Whittier sold the old farm, and re- 
moved with his mother and sister to Amesbury, a small 
town about nine miles nearer the sea than Haverhill. 
His principal reason for this change, it is said, was that 
his mother should be nearer the Friends' meeting-house 
where they had always worshiped. Mr. Whittier, like 
his ancestors, is a Quaker, and tells us that he is in the 
habit of tending Quaker meeting twice a week. 

At Amesbury, after the death of his mother, he 
lived with his beloved sister, Elizabeth, between whom 
and himself there was a bond so close that the want of 
other companionship was hardly felt. She is described 
as a rare woman, sympathizing with him thoroughly in 
his work, and not without literary ability herself. 

In this home the greater part of Mr. Whittier's 
literary work was done. Here he wrote his " Songs of 
Labor," his ballads, and his masterpiece, " Snowbound." 
When the home was broken up by the death of his sister 
and the marriage of his niece, he went to Oak Knoll, 
near Danvers, to become a welcome, honored member of 
the family of relatives residing there. Here he passes 
most of the time, but at certain seasons, impelled 
by a longing for old associations, he goes back to his old 
home. 

In reading a poet's words we often stop to wonder 
what he is like — ^how he looks — ^whether he ever loses 
his temper -or snubs the children — in short, what he is as 



WHITTIEE. 51 

a man. We obtain only a one-sided view of Mr. Whit- 
tier*s character from his stirring anti-slavery poems. 
They tell nothing of the gentleness, the abounding charity 
of the man. This we learn from other poems and from 
the many incidents illustrating it. 

His habit of genial conversation with all he meets 
and a happy faculty of adapting himself to his audience, 
render him a general favorite, not too much feared to be 
loved. A countryman who had once worked for him 



" Why, you would n't think it, would you ? but he 
talks just like common folks. He was talkin' about the 
apples one day, and he said, ' Some years they aint 
worth pickin' — just like any body, you know — aint stuck 
up at all — and yet he 's a great man, you know. " 

In an old bachelor, we seldom look for a love of 
children, but Mr. Whittier rivals Mr. Longfellow in the 
number of his little friends. Wherever they meet him, 
he is looked upon as legitimate prey, and enters so fully 
into their games, and gives so freely from his fund of 
stories that he is a welcome companion, always. An 
incident shows his sympathy with childish wants : — 

His little niece wanted the scarlet cape worn by 
other children. It was objected toby the family because 
of the Quaker habit of wearing drab, but Mr. Whittier 
insisted upon her having it. 

An amusing peculiarity is his color-blindness, which 
certainly does not appear in his pen-pictures. On one 
occasion the library fire, which he is so fond of having, 
damaged the border of the wall-paper ; he matched the 
pattern and triumphantly replaced it before detection^ 



52 AUTHOKS' BIRTHDAYS. 

•only to learn that he had substituted for the green vine 
one of autumnal crimson. 

Mr. Whittier's modesty and distrust of himself are 
well known, though he was once observed applauding 
vigorously one of his own poems — having failed to recog- 
nize his own words when delivered by another. 

■ His patience is often severely taxed by the letters 
and manuscript he receives from young writers, but he 
criticises, and advises, and often returns manuscript at 
his own expense. He writes about two thousand auto- 
graphs yearly. 

In appearance, Mr. Whittier is tall, slight, and 
erect, with black eyes that still flash under the white 
locks. He is active, and takes great interest in all that 
pertains to the home life. Every morning before break- 
fast, on fine days, he may be found in his garden, which 
he keeps scrupulously neat. He is a good talker, has a 
keen sense of the ludicrous, and is a welcome member 
of the family at Oak Knoll. 

He gives us in his life a beautiful picture of what 
old age may be with a cultured mind and a trusting 
lieart, and exemplifies his own words : — 

"1 mourn no more my vanished years! 

Beneath a tender rain, 
An April rain oi' smiles and tears, 

My heart is young figain. 

No longer forward nor behind, 

I look ill hope or fear; 
But, grateful, take the good I find; 

The best of now and here. 



WHITTIBR. 53 

And so the shadows fall apart, 

And so the west winds play, 
And all the windows of my heart 

I open to the day." 

13. Eecitation ... « Maud Muller." 

14. Eecitation - - - - '<The Sisters." 

15. Eecitation - - - " The ' Three Bells'." 

(Note.) Captain Leighton, of the English ship 
" Three Bells," some years ago, rescued the crew of an 
American vessel sinking in mid-ocean. Unable to take 
them off in the storm and darkness, he kept by them 
till morning, running down often during the night, as 
near to them as he dared, and shouting to them through 
his trumpet, " Never fear ! Hold on ! I '11 stand by 
you." 

16. Song and Chorus. The Good Ship " Three Bells." 

Come swell the strain, the proud refrain, 

That speaks of noble deeds; 
How true men brave, on ocean wave, 

Win Fame's most v/orthy meed! 
And high to-day in grateful lay. 

Mid music's witching* spells, 
Let eveiy lip bless i hat good ship. 

Brave Leigliton's ship, '"Three Bells." 

Chorus. 
0, the good ship "Three Bells!" 
0, the good ship **Three Bel!s!"' 
With a sturdy crew and a captain true, 
That man the good " Three Bells." 

When storms came down with blackest frown, 

And woke the ocean's wrath, 
And one lost bark in tempest dark 

Lay in the mad wind's path. 



54: AUTHOES' BIRTHDAYS. 

Heaven, pleased to prove that human love 

In Albion's bosom dwells, 
Turned to the wreck, that death-swept deck, 

Brave Leighton's ship, " Three Bells." 

Chorus. 
0, the good ship '•' Three Bells!" etc. 

They worked all day, they worked away, 

As brave tars only do, 
When from the wave they strive to save 

A sinking vessel's crew. 
A shout rose high. " All saved! " they cry. 

Hark ! how the paean swells 
Till earth's far bound rings with the sound, 

" God bless the good ' Three Bells'! " 

Chorus. 
0, the good ship "Three Bells!" etc. 

17. Eecitation - - " King Volmer and Elsie.'* 

18. Chain of Quotations. 

1. "God's errands never fail." 

2. " Alas for him who never sees 

The stars shine through his cypress trees ! " 

— Snow-Bound. 

3. "Life is ever lord of death; 

And love can never lose its own. " 

— Snow-Bound. 

4. " The home-pressed question of the age can find 
No answer in the catch-words of the blind 
Leaders of the blind. Solution there is none 
Save in the Golden Rule of Christ alone." 

—The Problem. 

5. God's ways seem dark, but soon or late, 
They touch the shining hills of day; 
The evil cannot brook delay. 

The good can well afford to wait." 

— Lines to Friends under arrest for aiding fugitive slaves. 



WHITTIEK. 55 

6. "0 heart, sore tried ! thou hast the best 
That Heaven itself could give thee, — rest." 

— Snow- Bound. 

7. "For, of all sad words of tongue or pen. 

The saddest are these: '"' It might have been." 

—Maud Muller. 

8. ' ' How wearily the grind of toil goes on 
Where love is wanting!" 

— Among the Hills. 

9. "Who holds to his another's heart, 
Must needs be worse or better." 

— Among the Hills. 

10. " For still in mutual sufferance lie.s 
The secret of true living, — 

Love scarce is love that never knows 

The sweetness of forgiving." 

— Among the Hills. 

11. " Heaven's gate is shut to him who comes alone : 
Save thou a soul, and it shall save thine own." 

—The Two Rabbis. 

12. "I only know I cannot drift 
Beyond his love and care." 

— The Divine Goodness. 

19. Song - - - - " Centennial Hymn." 

(J. K. Paine.) 

REFERENCE BOOKS. 
John Greenleaf Whittier. By Francis H. Underwood. Boston: 

Ticknor & (Jo. 
John Greenleaf Whittier. By W. Sloan Kennedy. Boston: 

D. Lothrop Company. 
Poets of America. By E. C. Stedman. Boston: Houghton, 

Mif&in & Co. 
Homes and Haunts of bur Elder Poets. By R. H. Stoddard. New 

York: D. Appleton & Co. 
Poets' Homes. Chicago and Boston : Interstate Publishing Co 
Riverside Literature, Xo. 5. Whittier Leaflets. American Prose. 

American Poetry. Boston: Houghton, MifELin & Co. 
Literary World. (Whittier No.) 1877. Boston. 



[Copyright, 1888, by S. E. Winchell <fe Co.J 

EVENTS IN THE LIFE OF BEYANT. 



CHRONOLOGICALLY ARRANGED. 



Born at Cummington, Mass. - Nov. 3, 1794. 

Published "The Embargo" - - - 1808. 

Entered Wilhams College - - . 1810. 

Left College -.--.. 1811. 

Wrote "Thanatopsis" - . . . 1812. 

Admitted to the bar - - - . . 1815. 

Wrote "To a Waterfowl" (See Sketch) - 1815. 

Eemoved to Great Barrington, Mass. - - 1817. 

Pubhshed "Thanatopsis" in N. A. Eeview - 1817. 

Married Frances Fairchild . - . . 1821. 

Published his first collection of poems - 1821. 

Abandoned law and removed to New York - 1825. 

Edited The New York Review - - - 1825. 
Became assistant editor of the N. Y. Evening Post 1826. 

Became chief editor of the Post - - 1829. 

Published second collection of poems - - 1832. 

First visit to Europe .... 1834. 

Bought his home, Cedarmere ... 1843. 

Second visit to Europe - - - - 1845. 

Third visit to Europe 1849. 

Pubhshed " Letters of a Traveler" - - 1850. 
Visited the Holy Land - - - - 1852. 
Fifth visit to Europe . . . . 1857. 
Published "Letters from Spain and Other Coun- 
tries" 1859. 



(56) 



BRYANT, 



57 



Mrs. Bryant died 1866. 

Sixth visit to Europe - - - - 1867. 

Published the first volume of "The Iliad" - 1870. 

Published the last volume of "The Odyssey" 1872. 

Published "The Flood of Years" - - 1876. 

Eeceived the gift of the vase - - - 1876. 



Died 



1. Singing 

2. Ebcitation 

3. Beading 

4. Hymn 

5. Eecitation 

6. Beading 

7. Becitation 

8. Becitation 

9. Becitation 

10. Beading 

11. Becitation 
] 2. Singing 



June 12, 1878. 



PBOGBAMME. 



(H. 



Hymns by W. C. Bryant. 
- "Bryant on his Birthday." 
W. Longfellow.) 

Life of Bryant. 

Sung at Mr. Bryant's funeral. 

- "To a Waterfowl." 

"A Forest Hymn." 

- "The Death of the Flowers." 

"Bobert of Lincoln." 

"The Planting of the Apple Tree." 

Bryant Incidents. 

- "A Lifetime." 

"Centennial Hymn." 



WILLIAM CULLEN BEYANT. 



Born Nov. 3, 1794. . - Died June 12, 1878. 

PKOGEAMME. 



1. Singing - - Hymn by W. C. Bryant. 

(Tune— St. Martins.) 

© Thou, whose own vast temple stands 

Built over earth and sea, 
Accept the walls that human hands 

Have raised to worship thee ! 

Lord, from thy inmost glory send, 

Within these walls to bide. 
The peace that dwelleth without end, 

Serenely by thy side ! 

May erring minds that worship here 

Be taught the better way ; 
And they who mourn and they who fear. 

Be strengthened as they pray. 

May faith grow firm and love grow warm. 

And pure devotion rise, 
While round these hallowed walls the storm 

Of earth-born passion dies. 

2. Eecitation - "Bryant on his Birthday.'* 

(H. W. Longfellow.) 

We praise not now the poet's art. 

The rounded beauty of |iis song; 
Who weighs him from his life apart 

Must do his nobler nature wrong. 

Not for rapt hymn nor woodland lay. 
Too grave for smiles, too sweet for tears; 

We speak his praise who wears to-day 
The glory of his seventy years. 

(58) 



BRYANT. 59 

Thank God 1 his hand on nature's keys 

Its cunning keeps at life's full span ; 
But dimmed and dwarfed in times like these, 

The poet seems beside the man. 

3. Reading . . . . Life of Bryant, 

William CuUen Bryant, the first American who at- 
tained poetical eminence, was born in Cummington, 
Mass., on the 3d of November, 1794. His father, Dr. 
Peter Bryant, was a physician of good education and 
scholarly habits, with a strong poetical taste. In hi^s 
library, which was unusually good for the time, were most 
of the English poets, kept there, we are told, not for or- 
nament, but to be handled and read by every member 
of the family. Cut off as they Avere in their isolated 
home from other companionship, and guided by the 
father's example, it is not strange that the little Bryants 
made companions of these human souls breathing through 
paper and sheep-skin, until Pope, Spenser, Scott and 
Wordsworth became familiar friends. An aged lady who 
lived near said she never passed the Bryant house in the 
winter evenings and looked into the windows without seeing 
three or four great hulks of boys stretched out, with their 
backs on the floor and their heads toward the birchwood 
fire, which was their only light, each one deeply immersed 
in his book. 

This love of books seems to have been born with them. 
At least we find remarkable family records of the precoc- 
ity of the children. The poet says in his autobiography : 
"When but a few days more than sixteen months old, 
there is a record that I knew all of the letters of the al- 
phabet. It is probable that my mother, finding me rath- 
er docile, took pleasure in bringing me forward some- 



60 AUTHOES' BIRTHDAYS, 

what prematurely. My elder brother, Austin, was more 
remarkable as an early scholar than myself. Before the 
close of his third year he began to read the Bible, and 
before he had completed his fourth year he had read the 
Scriptures through from beginning to end." 

We might question the good sense of a mother who 
would thus force the opening minds of her children, but 
the poet says of her, loyally: "She was a person of excel- 
lent sense, of a quick and sensitive moral judgment, and 
had no patience with any form of deceit or duplicity.'* 
And he adds this tribute : "Her prompt condemnation of 
injustice, even in those instances in which it is tolerated 
by the world, made a strong impression upon me in early 
life, and if in the discussion of public questions I have, 
in my riper years, endeavored to keep in view the great 
rule of right without much regard to persons, it has been 
owing in a good degree to the force of her example, 
which taught me never to countenance a wrong because 
others did." 

While the mother was thus, by precept and exam- 
ple, moulding the character of the little Cullen, as he 
was called, the father and grandfather were equally di-i- 
gent in training his poetical taste. He began making 
verses in his eighth year. He says of these juvenile ef- 
forts : "My father ridiculed them and endeavored to teach 
me to write only when I had something to say." But it is 
easy to see the father's pride through the ridicule, and it is 
probable that his criticisms were not of the kind to dis- 
courage the boy, but r ather to spur him on to greater effort. 

When he was ten years old he was appointed to de- 
liver an address at a school exhibition. He chose for his 



BEYANT. 61 

theme "The Progress of Knowledge in General and of the 
School in Particular." These verses were afterwards print- 
ed in the county newspaper, and must have acquired 
more than a local repute, inasmuch as they became a 
stock piece for recitation in other schools. It must have 
been about this time that the poet was in the habit, as he 
tells us, of supplicating in his private devotions that he 
might recieve the gift of poetical genius and write verses 
that might endure ! How far his grandfather was instru- 
mental in answering these prayers, when he set him to 
paraphrasing the Hebrew Scriptures we cannot tell ; but 
certainly few exercises for training the boy's imagination 
could have been better than that of rendering into his 
own words the incomparable poetry of the Old Testament. 
When young Bryant was thirteen he wrote a politi- 
cal satire called "The Embargo," aimed at President 
Jefferson and the policy of the Democratic party. His 
father, happening to find it in an unfinished state, urged 
him to finish it, and afterwards took it himself to Boston 
and had it published. The first edition was soon ex- 
hausted and a second was called for. In the Monthly 
Anthology, the great critical authority of the period, the 
following notice appeared : "If this poom be really writ- 
ten by a youth of thirteen, it must be acknowledged an 
extraordinary performance. We hav3 never met a boy 
of that age who had attained to such a command of lan- 
guao;e and to so much poetical phraseology." The doubt 
of its having been written by a boy of thirteen was so 
general that in the introduction to the second edition an 
offer was made to give the address of reliable persons 
who would corroborate the statement. 



62 authors' birthdays. 

"Thanatopsis," perhaps the best known of Mr. 
Bryant's poems, was written when he was eighteen, and 
appeared in The North American Review, then in its sec- 
ond year, the editor thinking until five years later that 
it was the work of the father. It is said that Mr. Bry- 
ant was inclined to resent the opinion sometimes incon- 
siderately expressed to him that "Thanatopsis" is the best 
of his poems, feeling, doubtless, that in the sixty-three 
years of literary work following it, he ought to have done 
something more mature than this work of the boy of 
eighteen, 

Mr. Bryant attended, but did not graduate from, 
Williams College. In later years the college was glad to 
confer upon him the degree of A. B., and has always 
numbered him among her alumni. 

After leaving college Mr. Br yant devoted himself to 
the law, which, after a few years, he abandoned for a lit- 
erary life He went to New York for this purpose and, 
after several minor ventures, became connected with The 
New York Evening Post. This connection was unsevered 
until his death fifty-three years later. Although the larger 
part of Mr. Bryant's writings have appeared in the 
form of editorials, it is as a poet that he is best known. 
To appreciate his work in this field, it must be remem- 
bered that he wrote at a time when we had no poets or 
literature worthy of the name. 

He stands before us great not only in what he him- 
self accomplished, but in the poetical taste which he suc- 
ceeded in developing in others. Mr. Godwin, his biog- 
rapher, says of him: "Many letters show Mr. Bryant's 
incessant activity in services to other writers. Besides 



BRYANT. 63 

these (his own hterary friends) many minor writers, anx- 
ious to avail themselves of his taste and judgment, en- 
closed their manuscripts to him, soliciting his opinion, 
and sometimes hinting that they would not be offended if 
he should rewrite the weaker parts. He was patient 
and good-natured with all, and often at pains to return 
elaborate corrections and advices. In these labors he 
was actuated by an urgent desire to help the cause of 
American letters." 

He is known as the "poet of nature," and in this field 
is unsurpassed. 

The price paid for some of these early poems is in- 
teresting, as showing the advance in the market value of 
such wares. Mr. Bryant received for "The Death of the 
Flowers" the sum of two dollars, and seems to have been 
well satisfied with the amount. He got even less by hi» 
first book, "fromwhich," says his son-in-law, "he received 
in five years, all expenses told, just fifteen dollars, minus 
eight cents." A gentleman met Mr. Bryant in a New 
York bookstore a few years before his death and said : "I 
have just bought the earliest edition of your poems and 
gave twenty dollars for it." "More, by a long shot," re- 
plied Mr. Bryant, "than I received for writing the whole 
work." 

Mr, Bryant's summer home for thirty years was in 
Eoslyn, Long Island, where he was surrounded by the 
trees, birds, and flowers that were always his companions. 
After the death of his wife he devoted himself untiringly 
to the translation of the Iliad and Odyssey, the last of 
which was published when he was seventy-seven years of 
age. Mr. Bryant's physical vigor was something remark- 



64: authors' birthdays. 

able. He was accustomed to the last to walk from his 
home in 1 6th street to his office, a distance of over two 
miles, and then if the elevator happened to be full would 
walk up eight flights of steps to the editorial rooms rath- 
er than wait. He attributed his good health to his mod- 
eration in eating and drinking, and to the use of gjrmnas- 
tic exercises. 

Mr. Bryant died in 1878, His intellectual vigor 
continued to the last, and his biography presents the re- 
markable record of a public literary life begun at thir- 
teen and ended at eighty-three. It is a record of daily, 
untiring work in his chosen field, of a large-hearted, 
helpful sympathy for his fellow-toilers, of a place hon- 
estly won, at the top — and rest at last. 
4. Hymn - - - - By W. C. Bryant. 

(Sung at his funeral. Tune — "Best.") 

Oh, deem not they are blest alone 

Whose lives a, peaceful tenor keep; 
The Power who pities man has shown 

A blessing for the eyes that weep. 

The light of smiles shall fill again 

The lids that overliow with tears; 
And weary hours of woe and pain 

Are promises of happier years. 

There is a day of sunny rest 

For every dark and troubled night ; 
And grief may bide an evening guest, 

But joy shall come with early light. 

For God hath marked each sorrowing day 

And numbered every secret tear, 
And heaven's long age cf bliss shall pay 

For all his children suffer here. 

6. Eecitation - - - "To a Waterfowl." 



BRYANT. 65 

(Note to be read by one in charge of the exercises.) 
After being admitted to the bar Mr. Bryant decided 
to try his fortune in the Httle village of Plainfield, "On 
the 15th of December he went over to the place to make 
the necessary inquiries. He says in a letter, that he felt, 
as he walked up the hills, very forlorn and desolate in- ' 
deed, not knowing what was to become of him in the big 
world which grew bigger as he ascended, and yet darker 
with the coming on of night. The sun had already set, 
leaving behind it one of those brilliant seas of chrysolite 
and opal which often flood the New England skies ; and 
while he was looking upon the rosy splendor with rapt 
admiration, a solitary bird made wing along the illumi- 
nated horizon. He watched the lone wanderer until it 
was lost in the distance, asking himself whither it had 
come, and to what far home it was flying. When he 
went to the house where he was to stop for the night his 
mind was still full of what he had seen and felt, and he 
wrote those lines, — as imperishable as our language, — 
'The Waterfowl.' " 

6. Beading - - - "A Forest Hymn." 

(This is Mr. Bryant's farewell to his Great Barring- 
ton home upon removing to New York. *<It was impos- 
sible for him to take a final leave of the grand old woods 
which for ten years had been the sanctuary of his musings, 
and which perhaps he might never see again, without of- 
fering to the mightiest amid their majestic solitudes, his 
solemn thanks and supplications. As he walked the col- 
umned aisles beneath the verdant roof, hearing only the 
soft winds that ran along the summit of the trees in mu- 
sic, he sangin grave and measured language his "Forest 



Q6 authors' birthdays. 

Hymn," pouring out his soul in worship to 'that univer- 
sal spirit which others, less simple and austere, find 
only in 'houses made with hands.'") 
T. Eecitation - "The Death of the Flowers." 

8. Ebcitation - - - "Eobert of Lincoln." 

9. Ebcitation "The Planting of the Apple Tree." 
10. Eeading . - . - Bryant Incidents. 

(These may be numbered and given to different ones 
to read, and others collected.) 

(1.) In 1865, an incident occurred which gave Mr. 
Bryant much pleasure. He received a letter from a lady 
in California, from which the following extracts are made : 
"On a recent visit to the Mammoth Grove in this state, 
as I entered the forest proper of the so-called 'big-trees,' 
my first feeling was one of awe, of worship if you will, 
and involuntarily there rose in my mind these words : 
'The groves were God's first temples.' As we passed 
through the grove we saw that many trees bore names of 
which all Americans are proud — Webster, Clay, and oth- 
ers. But as I remarked that as yet no poet had been so 
honored, a feeling of joy rose in me that perhaps the 
proud privilege might be mine of christening one of these 
magnificent growths. I made inquiries of the owner, 
and was informed that all that was necessary was to send 
a marble tablet appropriately lettered, and it should be 
placed on the tree I might select. Accordingly I selected 
the second tree at the right hand of the path — a very old 
tree. It is a splendid specimen of a green old age, stiU. 
strong, still fresh, the birds yet singing in its lofty top ; a 
fitting emblem of the poet of the forest — Bryant." 



BRYANT. '6T 

(2.) Mr. Biglow, in his Century Address, said of 
Mr. Bryant : "Mere worldly rank impressed him less 
than any man I ever knew. I was once his guest at Eos- 
lyn with a foreigner of some distinction, who at the close 
of the first repast after our arrival, presumed upon the 
privilege accorded to persons of *his rank at home to rise 
first and dismiss the table. Mr. Bryant joined me on 
our way to the parlor, and with an expression of undis- 
guised astonishment, asked me, 'Did you see that ?' I re- 
plied that I did, and with a view of extenuating the gen- 
tleman's offense as much as I could, said that he evident- 
ly thought he was exercising one of the recognized pre- 
rogatives of his order. 'Well,' he said, 'he will have no 
opportunity of repeating it here,' and he was as good as 
his word, for during the remainder of our sojourn no 
one was left in doubt whose prerogative it was in that 
house to dismiss the table." 

(3.) Bryant was master of a pure nervous English. 
So heartily did he detest neologisms and the use of for- 
eign terms, that he had hung up in the office of his paper 
for the guidance of his corps of writers, a list of tabooed 
words and phrases. 

(4.) When he was eighty years old, Mr. Bryant's 
friends presented him with a superb silver vase. On one 
side was a medallion of the poet's head, and on the reverse, 
two female figures of Poetry contemplating Nature. Oth- 
er medallions represented the boy learning verse from 
his father, who points to Homer, or musing in the grove 
where "Thanatopsis" was conceived. Among the orna- 
ments are the waterfowl, the bobolink, and the fringed 



-68 authors' birthdays. 

'gentian, while the ivy tells of age, the water-lily of elo- 
quence, and the amaranth of immorality. 

11, Ebcitation - - - - "A Lifetime." 

12. Singing - - - "Centennial Hymn." 



REFERENCE BOOKS. 



William Cullen Bryant. By Parke Godwin. New York: D. Apple- 
ton & Co. 

BUetch and Study of Bryant's Worhs. By Symington. New York: 
Harper & Brotliers. 

Homes and Haunts of Our Elder Poets. By R. H. Stoddard. New 
York: D. Appleton & Co. 

Poets' Homes. Cliicago and Boston : Interstate PublisMng Co, 

Homes of American Authors. By Curtis. New York : Putnam's 
Sons. 

TheBoysof My Boyhood. St, Nicholas. Dec. 1876. 



[Copyright, 18S8, by S. R. "Winchell & Co.] 

EVENTS IN THE LIFE OF HAYNE. 



CHRONOLOGICALLY ARRANaED. 



Born at Charleston, S. C. - - Jan. 1, 1830. 
Graduated from Charleston College - - 1850. 
Married Mary Middleton Michel - - 1852. 
Published first poems in Boston - - . 1855. 
Published "Sonnets and Other Poems" in Charles- 
ton 1857. 

Published in Boston, "Avolio, a Legend of the 

Island of Cos" - - - - 1859- 

Edited RusselVs Magazine - - 1857-1860. 

Entered the Southern Army ... 1861. 

Eemoved to "Copse Hill" - - - 1866. 

Edited Augusta Constitutionalist - - - 1866. 

Published "Legends and Lyrics" - - 1872. 

" "The Mountain of the Lovers" - 1876. 

" "Biographical Sketches" - - 1879.. 

" "Complete Poems" - - - 1882. 

Died at Copse Hill - - - July 6, 1886. 



(69. 



PEOGEAMME NO. 1. 



1. 


Music 




2. 


Ebading 


Sketch of Hayne's Life. 


3. 


Eecitation 


- "Threnody of the Pines." 
(W. H. Hayne.) 


4. 


Eecitation 


"The Bonny Brown Hand." 


6. 


Eecitation 


- "The Substitute." 
(For two voices.) 


6. 


Eecitation 


"The Stricken South to the North." 


7. 


Concert Eecitation - "Lyric of Action." 


8. 


Eecitation 


- "MacDonald's Eaid." 


9. 


Eecitation 


"Beyond the Potomac.'* 


10. 


Hymn 


- "The True Heaven." 



PEOGEAMME NO. 2. 



1. Eeading Sketch of Hayne in Complete Poems. 

(By Margaret Preston,) 

2. Eecitation - "Little Nellie in the Prison." 

3. Eecitation - - - "Artie's Amen." 

4. Eecitation - "The Planging of Black Cudjo." 

5. Eecitation - "Union of Blue and Gray." 

6. Eecitation - - "Frida and her Poet." 

7. Eecitation - - . "The Three Copecks." 

8. Eecitation "On the Death of President Garfield." 



(70) 



PAUL HAMILTON HAYNE. 
Bom Jan. 1, 1830. - - Died July 6, 1886. 



PEOGEAMME NO. 1. 



1. Music 

2. Eeading - Sketch of Paul Hamilton Hayne. 
The name of Hayne has been a distinguished one in 

the annals of South Carolina, from Eevolutionary 
times to the present. Men bearing it have been found 
occupying positions of honor and trust in every genera- 
tion for a century past. Noted among them was Eobert 
Young Hayne, U. S. Senator and Governor of South 
Carolina, who was the first to declare in Congress the 
right of a state to arrest the operation of a law that 
she considered unconstitutional, and in whom Daniel 
Webster found a "foeman worthy of his steel." 

Paul Hamilton Playne, nephew of the illustrious 
senator, was born at Charleston, S. C, on New Year's 
day, 1830. His father, a lieutenant in the U. S. Navy, 
died soon after his birth, leaving the boy to the protect- 
ing care of his widowed mother. 

The flayne House, in which the poet was born, is 
worthy of notice, particularly as showing the changed 
conditions of the fortunes of the family after the war. It 
was a typical Southern house of the better class, with 
spacious rooms on each side of the wide hall, and ample 
two-storied, many-pillared verandahs running round on 
three sides. A high basement story and a dormer- win- 
dowed roof added to its stateliness, and amid the trees 
and shrubbery of the spacious grounds it was a fitting 
home for senators, and governors, and military heroes. 

(71) 



T2 authors' birthdays. 

In this home, amid the refinements and social ad- 
vantages that wealth and culture bring, Paul Hamilton 
Hayne grew up. From early boyhood he had a passion- 
ate fondness for books, and eagerly read such works aa 
"The Arabian Nights," "Swiss Family Eobinson," and 
"The Anatomy of Melancholy." There seems to have 
been nothing remarkable about the boy as a student, ex- 
cept the poet's traditional dislike of mathematics and a 
marked proficiency in elocution and composition. He 
grew up a happy, enthusiastic lad, fond of his books, 
but fond, too, of outdoor sports. When eight years old 
he was taught to shoot by his famous uncle, and was 
afterwards justly proud of his ability as a marksman. A 
gun, a dog, and a horse, were the natural accompani- 
ments of a Southern youth of that time, and we hear of 
the horse "Loyal," which would allow no one but his mas- 
ter to mount him, though gentleness itself under his touch,, 
following him around and eating from his hand. In 
later years a favorite recreation with the poet was a bird- 
hunt on horseback. 

Young Hayne entered Charleston College at sixteen, 
and graduated three years later, in 1850. He afterwards 
studied law and was admitted to the bar, but literary 
pursuits were always more in accordance with his tastes 
than his chosen profession, and having sufficient fortune 
to enable him to follow his inclinations, he was a lawyer 
only in name. 

He soon became identified with the literary interests 
of his native city, and when, in 1857, an effort was made 
to establish in the South a literary magazine of the first 
rank, Mr. Hayne was chosen editor. The periodical, un- 



HAYNE. 73 

der the name of RusselVs Magazine, was sustained for three 
years with good ability, but finally went under, as many 
another has done, for want of financial support. Mr. 
Hayne's first volume of poems was published in Boston 
in 1855, the second in Charleston two years later, under 
the title of "Sonnets and other Poems," and the young 
poet began to command recognition in his own section of 
the country and in the North. "It was not, however, 
until the appearance of his third book, published in Bos- 
ton in 1859, that Mr. Hayne won general recognition at 
the North as a leading contemporary poet." 

When the war came, as might have been expected 
from his home, surroundings, and political antecedents, 
Mr. Hayne espoused the Southern cause, and went into 
the army. He was early appointed to a position on the 
staff of Gov. Pickens, of S. C, but his health was such 
that he was soon compelled to retire from the service. 
From his home, however, he sent forth war poems to 
stimulate those who could do active duty. Some of these 
poems are very beautiful, and show the devotion of the 
author to what he believed to be a righteous cause. One,. 
"Across the Potomac," was singled out for praise by Dr.. 
Oliver W. Holmes in a lecture on the poetry of the war. 
They have been published in the volume of "Complete 
Poems," with this note of explanation: "These poems 
are republished with no ill-feeling, nor with the desire to 
revive old issues ; but only as a record and a sacred- 
duty : 

'Fidelis ad urnam !", 

Mr. Hayne was married, in 1852, to Miss Mary Mid- 
dleton Michel, of Charleston, whose father served as sur- 



74 AUTHOES' BIRTHDAYS, 

geon in the army of Napoleon Bonaparte, and received a 
gold medal from the third Napoleon for services rendered 
at the battle of Leipsic under the first. Of the poet's 
wife, Margaret Preston, a personal friend, writes : "It 
is the scantiest justice to say that she has been the in- 
spiration, the stay, the joy of his life. No poet was ever 
more blessed in a wife, and she it is, who, by her self- 
renunciation, her exquisite sympathy, her position, her 
material help, her bright hopefulness, has made endura- 
ble the losses and trials that have crowded Mr. Hayne's 
life." 

The close of the war found the poet shorn of all 
save that which wealth cannot buy nor disaster take 
away — a cultivated mind and a noble character. "Dur- 
ing the bombardment of his native city his beautiful 
home was burned to the ground and his large and hand- 
some library utterly lost. Even the few valuables, such 
as the old family silver, which he succeeded in securing 
and removing to a bank in Columbia for safe keeping, 
were swept away in the famous 'majrch to the sea.'" Of 
his ample fortune nothing remained, and taking his wife, 
son, and mother, he crossed the line and began life over 
again in the "Pine Barrens"' of Georgia. 

His home Copse Hill," a few miles out from the 
city of Augusta, on the Georgia Eailroad, was a little 
white-washed cottage set in eighteen acres of uncultiva- 
ted land and surrounded by the native pines. A more 
hopeless place in which to make a home, it would be hard 
to find, but love is a wonderful brightener of the lot, and 
here for twenty years the poet lived, wrote, and was hap- 
py. In the little study, whose bare walls were papered, 



HAYNB. 75 

by the ingenuity of his wife^ with pictures cut from the 

periodicals and papers, at the desk made from the two 

ends of a work-bench used in building the house, and 

transformed by the same deft, loving hands into a piece 

of antique furniture, he writes : 

"This is my ■world! within these narrow walls, 
I own a princely service ; the hot care 
And tumult of our frenzied life are here 
But as a ghost and echo." 

And a friend writes of him : "He chose wisely when 
he retired from the scenes of busy life and devoted him- 
self to song and love in this retreat, benign in restful 
quietude and healthful air." 

His son, himself a poet of no mean pretensions, is 
the "Will" of whom the father says : 

"Through you, metliiuks, my long-lost youth 
Revives, from whose sweet founts of truth 

And joy I drink my fill; 
I feel your every heart-throb, know 
What inmost hopes within you glow; 
One soul's between us, Willi 
"Pray Heaven that this be always so; 

That even on your soul and mine, 
Though my thin locks grow white as snow. 

The self-same radiant trush may shine. 
Pray that while this, my life, endures, 
It aye may sympathize with yours 

In thought, aim, action, still; 
That you, son (till comes the end) , 
In me may find your comrade, friend, 
And more than father. Will!" 

The occupation which in earlier years had been a 
fascinating pastime, now became a means of obtaining 
a livelihood, and the name of Hayne appeared often in 
Northern magazines. The fourth book, "Legends and 



^6 authors' birthdays. 

Lyrics," was put forth in 1872 by the Lippincotts, and 
another volume appeared in 1876. These, with several 
biographical works, comprise his published books. His 
poems were published in 1882, by Lothrop, in one large, 
handsome volume, finely illustrated, with a biographical 
sketch by Margaret Preston. 

Of his place in literature a well-known writer says : 
"Hayne must justly be called the chief, living (1879) 
Southern writer. In his poems there is a fine feeling and 
daintiness of expression which greater poets in standard 
English literature have missed." A Southern critic says : 
"He interpreted the South to the world ; he interpreted 
her to herself. A popular poet with the masses he was 
not — but in preferring reputation to popularity and per- 
sistently keeping his voice in the true pitch for the select 
few rather than the numerical many, he acted the part 
of a genuine benefactor to the South, and adopted the 
very wisest plan available in the conditions of our liter- 
ature to lift up the uncultured masses of our people." 

Mr. Hayne was favorably known beyond the seas and 
some of his poems have been translated into the German. 

Beautiful thoughts sink deeper into our hearts when 
we know them to be the outgrowth of beautiful lives, 
and biography seldom shows us a more attractive char- 
acter than that of Paul H. Hayne. Cast from affluence 
to poverty, he bravely says : 

"I grant you thac our fate is terrible, 
Bitter as gall. What then? Will Idmentation, 
Childish complaint, everlasting wailings, 
Grief, groans, despair, help to amend our doom? 
Glance o'er the world — the world is full of pain 
Akin to ours." 



HAYNE. 77 

And in this spirit he battled with adversity, and con- 
quered. 

Those who knew him best pronounced him the most 
lovable of men, uniting with manly bravery and moral 
rectitude a gentleness that was almost womanly, and 
one says : "There was never a child that heard his voice 
ivhose heart did not warm to this gentle poet." He was 
a most companionable and genial man, utterly free from 
Tanity and self assertion, and possessed withal of the 
charity that "thinketh no evil." He found beauty in all 
created things and was quick to interpret it to those who 
■could not see it alone. 

His religious faith, as expressed in his poem ,"Face 
to Face," published in Harper's Monthly, sublimated his 
closing days, and he looked to Christ and immortality 
■ere "God's finger touched him and he slept." 

In his chosen field he was an assiduous toiler, the 
habit of regular work acquired as editor and reviewer 
never having been laid aside. His poems were often 
written, at first, on the fly leaves of books, and corrected 
afterwards. Until the final failure of his health, his 
favorite mode of composition — in prose — and frequently 
in verse — was to walk between his library and sitting- 
room, pausing to write at the standing desk made for 
him by his wife. " He was in the habit of reading aloud 
to the family from some interesting book, in the evenings, 
and his musical voice and correct rendering, made it a 
pleasure to listen to him. 

Mr. Hayne's health was never robust — he said of 
himself that he had hardly known what it was to be well 
.since he was sixteen years old — and in the autumn of 



78 authors' birthdays. 

1885 lie began to fail perceptibly. The unusually severe 
winter that followed told upon his strength, and when 
midsummer came the tired hand laid down the pen to 
take it up no more. 

He died July 6, 1886, and was buried from St. Paul's 
(Episcopal) Church in Augusta, Georgia. The floral dec- 
oration of the church was in charge of a committee from 
the "Hayne Circle" of Augusta, who thus paid their last 
tribute of love to their patron poet. Among the flowers, 
which were very profuse and beautiful, was a magnolia 
wreath from the poet's Charleston home, and the black 
draperies of the catafalque were fringed with the long 
needles of the Georgia pines, through which, for so many 
years at "Copse Hill," the wind had whispered its num- 
bers to his poetical soul. 

Mr. Hayne was beloved by all who knew him and it 
might almost be said of him as it was of the Prince of 
Orange, that "when he died the little children cried in 
the streets." He was laid to rest in the cemetery of 
Augusta until a fitting time should come to place his re- 
mains beside those of his ancestors in the city that he 
loved so well — the city by the sea. 
3. Eecitation - - "Threnody of the Pines.'* 
(For the passing of Paul Hayne.) 
By Wm. H. Hayne. 

The guardian pines upon the hill 
Were strangely motionless and chill, 

As if he drew his last loyed breath 
From the uplifted wings of Death. 

And now their mingled voices say, 
"The passing of a soul away, — 



HAYNE. 79' 

"The tenderest of the sons of men 
Our dead King Arthur of the pent 

"Oh, kindred of the sea and shore, 
Our grief is yours f orevermore I 

"His body lieth cold and still, 

For death has triumphed on the hill!" 

"The Bonny Brown Hand." 

- - - "The Substitute." 

Let the explanatory note be read.) 

"The Stricken South to the North. 

"Lyric of Action." 

(Four voices in concert.) 

"MacDonald's Eaid." 
"Beyond the Potomac." 
"The True Heaven." 
By the schooL (To any long metre tune.) 



4. 


Eecitation 


5. 


Eecitation 


(5 


'or two voices, 


6. 


Eecitation 


7. 


Eecitation 

/■■fi 


8. 


Eecitation 


9. 


Eecitation 


10. 


HyMN 



REFERENCE BOOKS. 



Poems' Homes. 2d Series. Chicago and Boston: Interstate Pub- 
lishing Co. 

Sketch in Hayne*s Complete Poems. Boston: D. Lothrop Co. 

Paul Hayne's Childhood. By M. J. Preston. Wide Awake, Feb. 
1888. 

Augusta Chronicle, July 13, 1886. 

Southern Magazine. Vol. 16, p 40. 

Southern Literary Messenger. Vol. 21, p. 122. 

Eclectic Monthly. Vol. 89, p 247. 

Literary World Vol. 16, p 11. 

lAterary World. Vol. 17; pp 349, 264. 



[Copyright, 1888, by S. E. Wincliell <fe Co.] 

EVENTS IN THE LIFE OF POE. 

CHRONOLOGICALLY ARRANGED. 



Eorn in Boston, . . . . Jan. 19, 1809 
Adopted by Mr. Allan ..... 1811 
Entered University of Virginia ... 1826 

Published "AlAaraaf". 1829 

Admitted to "West Point .... 1830 

Cashiered - - 1831 

Edited Southern Literary Messenger - - 1831 

PubHshed " Poems " 1831 

Married Virginia Clemm - - -- 1836 

Moved to New York 1837 

Edited Gentleman's Magazine - - - ' - 1839 
Edited Graham's Magazine - - - - 1840 

Published " Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque " 1840 

"Tales" 1845 

u (c Tjjg Eaven and Other Poems " - 1845 
Mrs. Poe died in New York .... 1848 
Died in Baltimore, - - - Oct. 7, 1849 



PEOGEAMMB. 



1. Music - - "A Dream within a Dream." 

H. Pontet. 

2. Beading - - . Sketch of Poe's Life. 

3. Music - - "To One in Paradise.'* 

G. W. Marston. 

(80) 



FOE. 



81 



4. Eecitation 
6. Eecitation 

6. Music 

7. Eecitation 

8. Eecitation 

9. Eeading 
10. Music - 



- ««The Haunted Palace." 
"TheBeUs." 
" Annabel Lee," 
M. W. Balfe. 

" The City in the Sea." 

- - "TheEaven." 

" The Philosophy of Composition." 

- - « The Eaven,"— Quartet. 

G. Barker. 



EDGAE A. POE. 



Born Jan. 19, 1809. - - Died Oct. 7, 1849. 

PEOGEAMME. 



1. Music - - "A Dream within a Dream." 

2. Sketch , - . - Edgar Allan Poe. 

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, January 19, 
1809. His father, a dissolute young man of good family 
in Baltimore, was educated for the bar, but meeting and 
becoming infatuated with a young English actress, Eliza- 
beth Arnold, he abandoned his profession, married her, 
and went upon the stage himself. 

The young couple, after playing with varying for- 
tunes in the seaboard cities, died within a short time of 
each other, of consumption, leaving three destitute chil- 
dren. The oldest, William, was cared for by his father's 
friends in Baltimore; Eosalie, the youngest, found a 
home with a Mrs. MacKenzie, of Eichmond, Va., where 



82 authors' birthdays. 

the mother died; and Edgar, a bright, beautiful boy, 
was adopted by Mr. Allan, a wealthy gentleman of the 
same city. 

Everything that affection could suggest was given 
the lad except the one thing he needed most — wise pa- 
rental restraint — and missing this, with his peculiar na- 
ture, it is not strange that he grew up wayward and 
self-willed. He went with his adopted father and mother^ 
when eight years old, to England, wWe he was placed 
in school. He remained here five years, and upon his 
return to Eichmond, was fitted for college by private 
tutors. He entered the University of Virginia in 1826, 
at the age of seventeen, and stood high in his classes, 
but a passion for gaming and for drink drew him into 
excesses that resulted in his leaving ' school after one 
year. Mr. Allan, his friend and benefactor, next at- 
tempted to employ him in his counting-room, but such 
a life was so contrary to the tastes of the young man, 
and the restraint so irksome to him, that he soon broke 
away from it entirely. 

During his college days he was in the habit of 
writing poetry and declaiming it to his companions 
whenever he could induce them to listen ; and his first 
step after declaring against a business life was to collect 
and publish these poems. The volume came out in Bos- 
ton in 1829, but seems to have brought him little fame 
and less money, and his resources having been exhausted 
by a few months of idleness, he entered the United States 
army. Afterwards, through Mr. Allan's influence, he 
received a cadetship at West Point, but the waywardness 



POE. 83 

of the child was not laid aside by the man and resulted 
in his being cashiered in 1831, 

Poe's life shows a series of ruptures and reconcilia- 
tions with his adopted father, but finally the death of 
Mrs. Allan and the subsequent marriage of Mr. Allan, 
together with the reckless misconduct of the young man 
himself, brought about a lasting estrangement which 
closed the doors of his friend's house upon him forever. 

Turning to literature now as a means of earning a, 
livelihood, Mr. Poe's first venture was a very successful 
one. The publisher of a literary journal in Baltimore 
having offered a prize of a hundred dollars for a prose 
tale, and the same for a poem, Poe became a competitor, 
and won both prizes. This opened to him an engage- 
ment as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, at 
Eichmond, and paved the way to a successful entrance 
upon his chosen field. But it was always the old story 
of wasted opportunities and failure for want of steady 
purpose and good habits, and in less than two years Mr. 
Poe was again adrift. 

It was during this time that his marriage occurred. 
While in Baltimore, some years before, he had met his 
cousin, Virginia Clemm, having been for some time an 
inmate of her mother's house. A strong attachment grew 
Tip between them, though she was scarcely more than a 
child, and they were married in Eichmond, in 1836. 
Mrs. Clemm, who was his father's sister, seems to have 
felt a mother's love for him, and remained a faithful 
friend through all his vicissitudes. The lasting affection 
between them is one of the bright spots in his clouded 
life. 



84: 



AUTHORS BIRTHDAYS. 



Kemoving to New York, Mr. Poe supported his 
family in a precarious way by his magazine articles, 
reviews, etc. A few years later he went to Philadelphia 
to take charge of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, but, 
quarreling with the proprietor after a year's connection 
with the periodical, he left it to take editorial control of 
Graham's Magazine, with a like result. All this time he 
was publishing his poems £nd tales ; but remuneration 
for literary productions was at that time so low that he 
was often reduced to extreme poverty. " The Eaven,'* 
his finest poem, brought him only ten dollars but " car- 
ried his fame to the four quarters of the earth. " The 
sickness of his wife with consumption, after his return to 
New York, brought his fortunes to their lowest ebb, and 
aid was asked by his friends for him in this strait. Her 
death was a great blow to him and his own followed in 
a year. 

He died in Baltimore in 1849, under most distress- 
ing circumstances. Being overcome by his old tempta- 
tion, he was found on the street in a state of delirium, 
was taken to the hospital, and breathed his last among 
strangers. His grave in Baltimore was unmarked until, 
in 1875, a stone was erected to his memory by the 
teachers of that city. In 1885 a bronze and marble 
memorial tablet was placed in the New York Museum of 
Art, bearing, below his name, this inscription : — 

"He was great in his genius, unhappy in his life, 
wretched in his death. But in his fame he is im- 
mortal." 

In person Mr. Poe was slight and hardly of medium 
height. He dressed with extreme neatness and good 



POE. 85 

taste, and was marked by a certain exactness in all he 
did. His manuscript was peculiar. He always wrote 
on paper about four inches wide, the ends being pasted 
together to form a long roll. His hand- writing was the 
delight of the compositor, being always neat and singu- 
larly uniform. 

When not under the influence of intoxicants, he was 
methodical and industrious in his literary habits, and 
" scrupulous to return a just amount of work for value 
received. " 

Mr. Poe has had many and severe critics; he has 
had, also, friendly critics who have sought to show that 
his weakness was the result of circumstance and inherit- 
ance. He came into the world freighted with a love of 
drink, a morbid nature, and high-strung nerves. Tender 
mother-love and wise fatherly counsel and restraint 
might have done much to modify the discordant elements 
of his soul — but these he did not have, and we see in 
him the sad spectacle of genius allied to a weak moral 
nature. Of his genius there can be no question, — even 
his severest critics admit this, — and his character we may 
safely leave with Him who "knoweth our frame," who 
"remembereth that we are dust." 

3. Music - - . - " To One in Paradise." 

4. Eecitation - - " The Haunted Palace." 

5. Eecitation - - - - " The Bells." 

6. Music - - - - " Annabel Lee." 
1. Eecitation - - - "The City in the Sea." 

8. Eecitation . . . - « The Eaven." 

9. Eeading - " The Philosophy of Composition." 
10. Music - - - " The Eaven,"— Quartet. 



86 authors' BIKTHDAIS. 

REFERENCE BOOKS. 



American Men of Letters Series. " Edgar Allan Poe." By Geo. 

E. "Woodbury. Boston : Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 
" Edgar A. Poe^ By W. J, Gill. 
Scribner (old) Vol. 20, page 107. E. C. Stedmaa. 
Harper's Monthly, Vol. 45, page 557. R. H. Stoddard. 
Southern Literary Messenger, Vol. 16, p. 172. 

" " " Vol. 20, p. 249. 

" Magazine, Vol. 15, pp. 190, 428. 
Living Age, Vol. 25, p. 77. 



[Copyright, 1888, by S. E. Winchell & Co.] 

EVENTS IN THE LIFE OF LOWELL. 

CHRONOLOGICALLY ARRANGED. 



Born at Cambridge, Mass. - - Feb. 22, 1819. 

Graduated from Harvard - - - - 1838. 

Entered the Law School .... 1838. 

Took his degree of LL. B. - - - 1840. 

Pubhshed "A Year's Life" - - - 1841. 

"A Legend of Brittainy" - - 1844. 

Married Miss Maria White - - - 1844. 

Pubhshed "Conversations on the Poets" - 1845. 

" "The Vision of Sir Launfal" - 1848. 

" "A Fable for Critics" - - - 1848. 

" "The Biglow Papers" - - 1848. 

Went to Europe in a sailing vessel - - 1851. 

Mrs. Lowell died 1853. 

Appointed Professor of Belles Lettres in Harvard 

University . .- . - - 1855. 
Studied in Europe - _ . . 1855-1856. 

Married Miss Frances Dunlap - - - 1857. 
Edited the Atlantic Moiithly - - 1857-1862. 
Edited the North American Review jointly with 

Chas. E. Norton - - - 1863-1872. 

Published "Biglow Papers" (2d series) - 1867. 

" "Under the Willows" - - - 1868. 

" "Among My Books" . - - 1870. 

" "My Study Windows" - - - 1871. 

Sent to Spain as U. S. Minister - - 1877. 

Was transferred to England - . - 1880. 

Eeturned to the United States - - - 1885. 

(87) 



PEOGRAMME. 



1. Instrumental Music 

2. EoLL Call 

3. Eeading . - - Sketch of Lowell. 

4. Eecitation - - - - "My Heritage.'* 

5. Eeading - - - - Home Life. 

6. Eecitation - . . "The Dead House.'* 

7. Eeading . . . . Literary Work. 

8. Eecitation - "The Vision of Sir Launfal.'* 

9. Eeading Professor, Editor, and Foreign Minister. 

10. Music 

11. Eeading . . _ . Personal Traits. 

12. Eecitation . . . «The Courtin'.'* 



JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL. 



February 22, 1819. 

Hang or. the wall a large picture of Lowell. Below 
write a fac simile of his signature copied from the Low- 
ell Leaflets, or made with a stencil. 

On the board, on one side of the rostrum, write in. 
large letters : — 

POET AND PROFESSOR, 
and hang a wreath of evergreen above. 
On the other side write : 

FOREIGN MINISTER, 

and drape a flag above it. 

Under this make a scroll and put in it a list of Mr» 

Lowell's books : Poems. 

A Year's Life. Fireside Travels. 

Conversations on the Poets. Under the Willows. 

Biglow Papers. My Study Windows. 

A Fable for Critics. Among My Books. 

(88) 



LOWELL. 8^ 

PEOGEAMME. 



1. Instrumental Music 

2. EoLL Call 

(To be answered by short quotations.) 
Quotations. 

1. "Life is a sheet of paper white, 
Whereon each one of us may write 

His word or two, and then comes night." 

2. "Not failure, but low aim, is crime." 

3. "And what is so rare as a day in June I" 

4. "Be noble! and the nobleness that lies 
In other men, sleeping, but never dead, 
Will rise in majesty to meet thine own." 

5. "He 's true to God who 's true to man." 

6. Truth forever on the scaffold, 
Wrong forever on the throne. " 

7. "New occasions teach new duties ; 

Time makes ancient good uncouth; 
They must upward still and onward, 
Who would keep abreast of Truth," 

8. "Each day the world is born anew 
For him who takes it rightly." 

9. "Joy comes, grief goes, we know not how." 

10. "Children are God's apostles, day by day 

Sent forth to preach of love, and hope, and peace." 

11. "Though the cause of Evil prosper, 
Yet 'tis Truth alone is strong." 

12. "They are slaves who fear to speak 
For the fallen and the weak." 

13. "They are slaves who dare not be 
In the right with two or three." 



90 authors' birthdays. 

S. EEADmG - - - Sketch of Lowell. 

It is rare in America to find one at sixty-nine living 
in tlie house where he was born. We would hardly look 
for it outside of New England. But the roof -tree of "Elm- 
wood" has sheltered three generations of Lowells, and 
seems good for three more. With spacious grounds 
stretching out on one side to beautiful Mount Auburn, 
and filled with oaks, and elms, and singing birds that 
are never molested, within a stone's throw of Longfellow's 
home, stands the house that adds another attraction to 
classic Cambridge. 

It is a stately, three-story mansion with none of the 
bays, and oriels, and balconies of modern architecture, 
but very roomy and comfortable, and extremely respect- 
able withal, as if, like its owner, it felt no necessity for 
putting forth any such claims to aristocracy and blue 
blood. 

Here, on the 22d of February, 1819, our poet was 
born. Mr. Underwood, his biographer, says of him: 
*'Mr. Lowell is one of the most favorable examples of 
English descent and American culture." 

Mr. Emerson has said: "Every man is a quotation 
from his ancestors." Looking at Mr. Lowell's charac- 
teristics and then at his ancestry, we see the force of the 
assertion. Among them is the energetic man of business 
who, "perceiving that the wealth of New England was to 
come from manufactures," laid the foundation for the 
future prosperity of the city of Lowell, and for the per- 
petuation of the family name at the same time. Another, 
Mr. Lowell's grandfather, was the author of the sec- 
tion in the Bill of Eights abolishing slavery in Massa- 



LOWELL. 91 

chusetts. (Is not Hosea Biglow a direct quotation from 
this patriotic old gentleman ?) Another shows his love of 
education, and of his fellow-men as well, by endowing 
Lowell Institute in Boston, thus furnishing annual cours- 
es of free lectures at a cost to himself of $250,000. 

We trace the practical ability, solid character, and 
kindred traits, to the father's side, but we find no hint 
here of poetical genius which distinguishes Mr. Lowell 
from other men of character. Has this come spontane- 
ously? Softly! "When the little Lowells are in their 
cradles we hear of the mother beguiling them with sto- 
ries, and romances, and legends "until poetic love and 
feeling were as natural to them as the bodily senses." 
While the sterling character and practical common-sense 
come from the Lowells, the love of the beautiful and the 
poetical genius are as clearly traceable to the mother. 

Mr. Lowell entered Harvard College in his sixteenth 
year and graduated in 1838. His scholarship was never 
a matter of pride with him. He says of himself that he 
read everything — except — the text-books prescribed. But 
while he was neglecting mathematics, he was storing his 
mind with other material which he found in travels, ro- 
mances, poems, etc., that was to be more useful to him, 
because better suited to his tastes. 

He began the practice of law, but found in it little 
that was congenial and soon went back to his birds and 
books at "Elmwood." His first book, entitled "A Year's 
Life," was published when he was nearly twenty-two. 
It was followed, a few years later, by another volume con- 
taining some of his most popular poems. His work was 
found — his career open to him. One of the best known 



92 authors' birthdays. 

of Mr. Lowell's shorter poems, "The Heritage, " is in this 
volume. 

4. Eecitation - - - "The Heritage.'* 

5. Beading - - . . . Home Life. 
Mr. Lowell was married in 1844 to Miss Maria 

White. His domestic life is represented as being rarely 
beautful. Mrs. Lowell was an intellectual woman, well 
suited to be a companion for her husband. And yet 
their home was not without its griefs. Beautiful children 
came to them only to stay until they had made for them- 
selves a place which would never be filled by aught else, 
and then — ^the home was childless. Of their mission 
Mrs. Lowell herself sings in a minor key in "The Alpine 
Sheep," addressed to a bereaved mother. 

"They in the valley's sheltering care, 

Soon crop the meadow's tender prime, 
And when the sod grows brown and bare 

The shepherd strives to make them climb 

"To airy shelves of pasture green 

That hang along the mountain's side, 
"Where grass and flowers together lean, 

And down through mists the sunbeams slide. 

"But naught can tempt the timid things 

The steep and rugged paths to try, 
Though sweet the shepherd calls and sings, 
And seared below the pastures lie, 

"Till in his arms their lambs he takes 

Along the dizzy verge to go ; 
Then, heedless of the rifts and breaks, , 

They follow- on, o'er rock and snow. ' 

'*And in those pastures lifted fair, ' 

More dewey-soft than lowland mead. 
The shepherd drops his tender care, 
And sheep and lambs together feed." 



LOWELL. 93 

In the study, above one of the pictures, may be seen 
a pair of little shoes, telling silently their pathetic story. 
Only one daughter, now Mrs. Edward Burnett, lived to 
cheer the poet's home. 

After nine years of married life Mrs. Lowell faded 
away, and in 1853 the end came. On the day of her 
death a child was born to Mr. Longfellow, and his poem 
<'The Two Angels," was an expression of his sympathy. 

"Two angels, one of Life and one of Death, 
Passed o'er the village as the morning broke ; 

The dawn was on their faces, and beneath 
The sombre houses hearsed with plumes of smoke. 

"'Twas at thy door, O friend ! and not at mine. 

The angel with the amaranthine wreath, 
Pausing, descended, and with voice divine, 

Whispered a word that had a sound like Death. 

"Then fell upon the house a sudden gloom, 

A shadow on those features fair and thin ; 
And softly, from the hushed and darkened room. 

Two angels issued, where but one went in." 

Mr. Lowell's grief at his wife's death, and the deso- 
lation of his home, are touchingly shown in "The Dead 
House." 

6. Recitation - - "The Dead House." 

7. Eeading ... - Literary Work. 
Perhaps the work which won for Mr. Lowell most 

immediate recognition is his inimitable "Biglow Papers," 
•which appeared first as anonymous contributions to 
newspapers. It was at the beginning of the Mexican 
War, and it was claimed by the anti-slavery party, that 
the war was waged for the purpose of securing another 
slave state. While the abolitionists were fighting man- 



94 authors' birthdays. 

fully with their heavy guns, there suddenly came from 
some unknown source a scattering fire of ridicule through 
the mouth of Hosea Biglow, that was destined to be 
more effective than all their reasonings and Scriptural 
arguments. Nobody likes ridicule, and the jingling 
rhymes with their homely phraseology and keen point 
did good service for the cause. 

When, in 1861, the "War of the Eebellion commenced, 
Hosea Biglow again took the field, and a second series 
of papers was the result. In these papers Mr. Lowell 
is said to have surpassed all rivals in depicting Yankee 
character and dialect. 

Following the "Bigelow Papers" came "A Fable for 
Critics," in which the anonymous author calls before 
him the prominent writers of the day, and has each sit 
for a portrait, which is sometimes painfully true to life, 
but which,-after all, has nothing malicious in it. Whit- 
tier, Bryant, Holmes, and a host of others, come in for 
good natured raps and then are dismissed for the "next." 

Among the best of Mr. Lowell's poems, of an en- 
tirely different character, is the "Vision of Sir Launfal.'^ 
It is said that this poem was composed in a kind of po- 
etic fury in the space of forty-eight hours, during which 
time the author hardly ate or slept. 

8. Eecitation - "The Yision of Sir Launfal." 

(With note.) 

Let one pupil take the first part and one the second, 
if it is thought too long for one. The prelude to each 
part may be omitted. 

9. Beading. Professor, Editor, and Foreign Minister. 



LOWELL. 95 

In 1855 Mr. Lowell was appointed Mr. Longfellow's 
successor as Professor of Belles Lettres at Harvard, with 
eave of absence for two years. This time he spent in 
Europe preparing himself for his new work. No pro- 
fessor was ever more popular, and his lectures are among 
his best contributions to our literature. 

Not as a poet only has James Eussell LoweU a place 
among our literary men, but as essayist and editor as 
well. He edited the Atlantic Monthly for five years, 
and the North American Revieiv for nine. Among his 
prose writings are : "Fireside Travels," "My Study Win- 
dow," and "Among My Books." 

Mr. Lowell's interest in polities, as shown in the 
"Biglow Papers," was rather the championship of a 
great cause than mere party spirit. He had never held 
any office whatever until his appointment as Minister ta 
Spain in 1877. Upon the retirement of Mr. Welsh, 
Minister to England, Mr. Lowell was transferred to Lon- 
don. His reception by the English people was cordial 
and flattering in the extreme, and his accompHshed wife,^ 
to whom he was married in 1857, shared his popularity. 
This lady was formerly Miss Frances Dunlap, of Port- 
land, Maine, and had had charge of the education of 
Mr. Lowell's daughter during his residence abroad. 

10. Music 

11. Beading . . - Personal Traits* 

Mr. Lowell is of medium height, slender, but active 
and well preserved. His hair is a dark auburn, and his 
fu^l beard rather lighter and more ruddy. He is fond of 
exercise, and never rides when he can walk. He is fond, 



Vd authors birthdays. 

too, of his gun and rod, and has a practical acquaintance 
ivith nature. 

He enjoys his home and is not at all a society man, 
though socially he is one of the most affable and cour- 
teous of men, and a most genial companion. It is said 
that when he and his life-time friend, Dr. Holmes, meet, 
there is invariably an interchange of wit that is as fine 
an exhibition of mental pyrotechnics as is often seen. 
"The father of Dr. Holmes was a stout orthodox clergy- 
man ; Mr. Lowell's father was a mild and conservative 
Unitarian. The Autocrat has developed into a liberal, 
and our poet has been growing more and more conserva- 
tive until now the relative positions of the sons are nearly 
the reverse of those of the fathers." 

The friendship between Longfellow and Lowell has 
been already alluded to. The historian Motley was 
another intimate friend, and he pays George William 
Curtis the compliment of dedicating to him his complete 
poems. Mr. Lowell's habits are not methodical, but 
being a man of untiring energy he accomplishes much. 

One of the best known and most popular of Mr. 
Lowell's character pieces is called "The Courtin'." He 
was called upon as the "Biglow Papers" went to press 
to fill up a vacant page, and wrote "Zekle's Courtship" 
off-hand. As there were only six stanzas it was thought 
to be an extract, and the public was clamorous for the 
rest. From time to time other stanzas were added until 
in its completed form there are twenty-four. 
12. Eeading - - - - "The Courtin'." 

(Let one read the poem while two act it out. Ar- 
range the stage to represent a New England kitchen, have 



LOWELL. 97 

a good reader, and be sure that the "action suits the 
word.") 

REFERENCE BOOKS. 

Life of James Russell Lowell. By F. H. Underwood. Boston: 
Ticknor & Co. 

Life of Lowell. By E. E. Brown, Boston: D. Lothrop Co. | 

Poets of America. By B. C. Stedman. Boston: Houghton, Miff- 
lin & Co. 

Poets' Homes. Chicago and Boston: Interstate Pub. Co. 

Harper's Weekly. June 20, 1885. 

Harper's Monthly. January 1881. 



[Copyright, 1888, by S. R. Winchell & Co.] 

EVENTS IN THE LIFE OF LONGFELLOW. 

CHRONOLOGICALLY ARRANGED. 



Bom in Portland - . - . Feb. 27, 1807. 

Entered Bowdoin College .... 1821. 

Graduated , - - 1825. 

Was appointed to a professorship in Bowdoin Col- 
lege 1826. 

Traveled and studied in Europe - 1826-1829. 

Entered upon his duties as professor - - 1829. 

Married Mary Potter ... . 1831. 

Was invited to the chair oi Modern Languages in 

Harvard University - . . . 1834. 

Went to Europe for further study - - - 1835. 

Mrs. L. died at Eotterdam - . . - 1835. 

Entered upon his duties at Harvard - - - 1836. 

Made a third journey to Europe - - - 1842. 

Married Frances E. Appleton - . . 1843. 

Eetired from Harvard - - - - 1854. 

Mrs. Longfellow died 1861. 

Made a fourth journey to Europe - - 1868. 

Beceived the arm-chair from the children of Cam- 
bridge .... 1879. 

Died at Cambridge, Mass. - March 24, 1882. 



PEOGKAMME NO. 1. 



1. Singing - " Stars of the Summer Night." 

2. Eoll-Call To be answered by short quotations. 

(98) 





LONGFELLOW. 99 


3. 


Beading . - . Longfellow's Life. 


4. 


Ebcitation - - - "The Children's Hour." 


5. 


Eecitation '- - - - " Eesignation." 


6. 


Song - - - " The Eainy Day." 


7. 


Concert Eecitation - "The Old Clock on the 




Stairs." 


8. 


Eecitation - - "The Village Blacksmith." 


9. 


Eecitation - - " From My Arm-chair." 


10. 


Eeading - - Longfellow's Literary Life. 


11. 


Concert Eecitation - - " The Builders." 


12. 


Eecitation - " The Wreck of the Hesperus." 


13. 


Song. - .... "Excelsior." 


14. 


Eeading - - - - Personal Traits. 


15. 


Eecitation - - - "A Psalm of Life." 


16. 


Song - - - - "The Day is Done." 



PEOGEAMME NO. 2. 
(For older pupils.) 



1. Song - - - - " A Psalm of Life." 

2. Essay - - - Longfellow's Life. 

(Written by a pupil.) 

3. Eecitation - - " Paul Eevere's Eide." 

4. Eeading .... Longfellow's Home. 

(From Poets' Homes.) 

5. Song - - " The Arrow and the Song." 

6. Essay - - - The Story of Evangeline. 

(Written by a pupil, introducing at appropriate 
places, quotations from the poem.) 



100 authors' birthdays. 

7. Eecitation - - "Hiawatha's Childhood." 

8. Eecitation - - " The Death of Minnehaha. " 

9. Song - - - - - "Minnehaha." 

10. Essay - The Courtship of Miles Standish. 

11. Eecitation - - - "Priscilla's Answer." 

12. Longfellow Anecdotes. 

(To be collected by the pupils and teacher. 
There will be no difficulty about finding, enough 
to make this a pleasant feature.) 

13. Eecitation - - - "The Bell of Atri." 

14. Song - ... "Aftermath." 



PEOGEAMME No. 3. 



The Courtship of Miles Standish. 
Dramatized and arranged for private theatricals or 
school exhibitions. 

Published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston. 



HENEY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 



Eorn Feb. 27, 1807 - - Died March 24, 1882. 



PEOGEAMME No. 1. 



Place on an easel a large picture of Longfellow. 
Hang pictures of Longfellow's Home, Evangeline, The 
Courtship of Miles Standish, Longfellow's Children, by 



LONGFELLOW. 101 

T. B. Eead, or any others that can be obtained. Back 
of the rostrum print on the board in fancy stencil letter- 
ing:— 

"The Children's Poet." ' 

BoBN Died 

Feb. 37, 1807. March 24, 1882. 

On one side of this write on the board the following : — 

WOEKS. DATE, 

Outre-Mer 1835. 

Voices of the Night 1839. 

Hyperion 1839. 

Ballads 1841. 

The Spanish Student 1843. 

The Belfry of Bruges 1846. 

Evangeline 1847. 

Kavanagh 1 849. 

The Seaside and the Fireside. . . 1850. 

The Golden Legend 1851, 

The Song of Hiawatha 1855. 

The Courtship of Miles Standish . 1858. 

Tales of a Wayside Inn 1863. 

Fleur-de-Luce 1867. 

New England Tragedies 1868. 

Divine Comedy 1867-70. 

Aftermath 1874. 

The Masque of Pandora 1875. 

Keramos 1879.- 

Ultima Thule .. 1880. 



102 authors' birthdays. 

On the other side write the following : 

TRANSLATIONS INTO DIFFERENT LANGUAGES. 

German. Spanish. 



Dutch. 


Polish. 


Swedish. 


Eussian. 


Danish. 


Latin. 


French. 


Hebrew. 


Italian. Chinese. 
Portugese. Sanscrit. 
Marathi. 



PEOGEAMME NO. 1. 



1. Quartette - '"Stars of the Summer Night." 

(From the Spanish Student.) 

2. Eoll-Call - To be answered by short quotations. 

quotations. 

1. "I will work in my own sphere ; nor wish it 
other than it is. This alone is health and happiness ; 
this alone is life." From Hyperion. 

2. " Believe me, the talent of success is nothing 
more than doing what you can do well ; and doing well 
whatever you do, without a thought of fame." 

From Hyperion. 

3. " If we could read the secret history of our 
enemies, we should j5nd in each man's life sorrow and 
suffering "enough to disarm all hostility." 

From Kavanagh. 

4. "In character, in manners, in style, in all 
things, the supreme excellence is simplicity." 

From Kavanagh. 



LONGFELLOW. 103 

5. "The mind of the scholar, if you woiild have 
it large and liberal, should come in contact with other 
minds." From Hyperion. 

6. " Every man must patiently bide his time. He 
must wait. Not in listless idleness, not in endless pas- 
time, not in querulous dejection, but in constant, steady, 
cheerful endeavors, always willing, and fulfilling, and ac- 
complishing his task, that when the occasion comes, he 
may be equal to the occasion." From Hyperion. 

7. " Let hiin not boast who puts his armor on, 
As he who puts it off, the battle won." 

From Morituri Saiutamus. 

8. " Stay, stay at home, my heart, and rest; 
Home-keeping hearts are happiest ; 

For those who wander they know not where, 
Are full of trouble and full of care ; 
To stay at home is best." 

Song. 

9. " Study yourselves; and most of all note well, 
Wiierein kind Nature meant you to excel." 

From Morituri Saiutamus. 

10. "The heights by great men reached and kept 

Were not attained by sudden flight : 

But they, while their companions slept. 

Were toiling upward in the night. " 

From The Ladder of St. Augustine. 

11, "Lives of great men all remind us 

We can make our lives sublime, 
And, departing, leave behind us 
Footprints on the sands of time." 

From A Psalm of Life. 

12. " It is always painful to discover the limitations 
of a person's mind whom otherwise you like." 

From Mr. Longfellow's journal. 



104 authors' birthdays. 

13. "Iiithis world a man must be anvil or ham- 
mer." 

(Good and suitable quotations can be taken from 
Longfellow birth-day books or from old Longfellow Cal- 
endars. It is well to let pupils make their own selec- 
tions.) 

3. Beading - - - - Longfellow's Life. 

A visitor to Portland, Maine, will be sure to have 
pointed out to him, as one of the points of interest, a 
large, square, three-story building on Congress street, 
adjoining the Preble House. His interest in it deepens 
when he is told that it is the place in which Henry W. 
Longfellow spent his boyhood. 

We are told that the poet who relates so beautifully 
the love story of Priscilla and John Alden can trace his 
lineage directly back to the " Puritan maiden " and the 
"dexterous writer of letters." The best blood of New 
England is in his veins; wealth and leisure, with the 
culture and advantages that only wealth and leisure can 
bring, have been his, and in his finished work we see the 
result of this happy combination of circumstances. 

Mr. Longfellow entered Bowdoin College at fourteen 
and was graduated at eighteen, with an excellent record, 
standing second in a class of thirty-seven. His transla- 
tion of an Ode of Horace in his Sophmore year called 
attention to him as a possible candidate for the new pro- 
fessorship of Modern Languages and resulted in his 
being called, after his graduation, to this chair. He ac- 
cepted it upon condition that he should be allowed three 
years of preparation in Europe. 



LONGFELLOW. 105 

At twenty-two he entered upon his professional life 
at Bowdoin College, to resign in five years later for a 
similar position at Harvard. Availing himself of per- 
mission to be absent for a year in Germany, Mr. Long- 
fellow, in 1835, again sailed for Europe, this time ac- 
companied by his wife, formerly a Miss Potter, to whom 
he was married while at Bowdoin. During his absence a 
great sorrow came upon him in her death. He alludes 
to her touehingly in the poem entitled : "The Footsteps of 
Angels." 

" With a slow and noiseless footstep 

Comes that messenger divine, 

Takes the vacant chair beside me, 

Lays her gentle hand in mine. 

And she sits and gazes at me 

"With her deep and tender eyes, 
Like the stars, so still and saint-like, 

Looking downward from the skiesi, 

Uttered not, yet comprehended 

Is the spirit's voiceless prayer; 
Soft rebukes, in blessings ended, 

Breathing from her lips of air. 

O, though oft depressed and lonely, 

All my fears are laid aside, 
If I but remember only 

Such as these have lived and died!" 

After a year and a half spent in study in Germany, 
Mr. Longfellow entered upon his duties at Harvard and 
"Was soon after domiciled in the house which was his 
home until his death. In 1843 he was married to Miss 
Appleton, the Mary Ashburton of " Hyperion," a lady 
"possessed of every grace of mind and person that 
could charm the soul of a poet. " For eighteen years 



106 authors' birthdays. 

she made his home all that a home could be^ and then 
was taken from it bj an accident so shocking as to sad- 
den his remaining years. " On the 9th of July/' says 
Mr. Samuel Longfellow, " she was sitting in the library 
with her two little girls, engaged in sealing up some 
small packages of their curls which she had just cut off. 
From a match fallen upon the floor her light summer 
clothing caught fire. The shock was too great, and she 
died the next morning. Three days later her burial took 
place at Mt. Auburn. It was the anniversary of her 
marriage day, and on her beautiful head, lovely and un- 
marred in death, some hand had placed a wreath of 
orange blossoms." 

The blow fell upon the husband with crushing force, 
but his grief was borne in silence. No word of it found 
expression in verse. In his diary, published since his 
death, is this pathetic entry on the Christmas following : 

" Dec. 25. — How unexpressibly sad are all holidays ! 
But the dear little girls had their Christmas-tree last 
night, and an unseen presence blessed the scene." 

" The dear little girls" were the 

" Grave Alice and laughing Allegra 
And Edith with golden hair," 

who have been made immortal in "The Children's Hour." 
They, with two sons, Charles and Ernest, were left to 
bless the poet's after life. Of these daughters, Edith is 
now Mrs. Richard Henry Dana, while the others are un- 
married. 

4. Eecitation - - "The Children's Hour." 

5. Eecitation . - - - " Eesignation." 



LONGFELLOW. 107 

6. Song - ... « The Eainy Day." 

7. CoNCEKT Eecitation - " The Old Clock on the 

Stairs." 
(To be given by six young girls. Let the arms be 
moved back and forth to represent the pendulum, during 
the refrain, which may be given by three girls and 
answered by the other three.) 

8 Eecitation - - " The Village Blacksmith." 

9. Eecitation - - " From My Arm-chair. " 

(Note. On his seventy-second birthday Mr. Long- 
fellow was presented by the children of Cambridge with 
an elaborately carved chair made from the wood of the 
" spreading chestnut tree." The poet acknowledged it 
in a beautiful poem, a printed copy of which was given 
to every child who came to see and sit in the chair.) 

10. Beading - - Longfellow's Literary Life. 

Like most true poets Mr. Longfellow began writing 
at an early age. While in college his contributions to 
the Portland newspapers attracted much attention, and 
these, with his translations, soon placed him in the high- 
est rank of college poets. His first published work is a 
translation from the Spanish ; his first original work is 
"Outre-Mer," published in 1835. Prom this time on 
there is a succession of poems, travels, translations^ and 
reviews that tell a story of unceasing mental activity. 
Such work, in addition to the duties of his profession, 
could never have been accomplished but by the closest 
economy of time. 

In 1854 Mr. Longfellow retired from Harvard to 
devote himself exclusively to literary pursuits. His 



108 authors' birthdays. 

morning hours were given up to study and writing, and 
visitors were not admitted until after twelve o'clock. 

The story of "Evangeline," one of the most popu- 
lar of his books, originated in this way : Nathaniel Haw- 
thorne and Mr. H. L. Connolly were dining one day with 
Mr. Longfellow and Mr. Connolly told the story which is 
the ground work of " Evangeline. " Some conversation 
ensued as to its suitableness for a romance or poem. 
Hawthorne was not drawn to it, and told Mr. Longfel- 
low, who, on the contrary, was deeply impressed by it, 
that he would relinquish all claim to it in his favor. The 
beautiful poem was the result. 

Perhaps the most widely known of Longfellow's 
poems is Hiawatha. It appeared in 1865, attracted im- 
mediate attention, and was severely criticised. The 
newspapers all over the country took up the discussion 
and the feeling became intense. Through all this storm 
Mr. Longfellow remained calm, paying no attention to 
assailants or defenders. It is said that Mr. Field, the 
publisher, one day hurried off to Cambridge in a state 
of great excitement, — that morning's mail having brought 
an unusually large batch of attacks and parodies, some 
of the charges being, he considered, of a seriously dam- 
aging character, 

"My dear Mr. Longfellow," he exclaimed, bursting 
into the poet's study, " these atrocious libels must be 
stopped!" Longfellow glanced over the papers without 
comment. Handing them back, he quietly asked : " By 
the way, Fields, how is Hiawatha s.elling ?" 

" Wonderfully.!" replied the excited publisher, "none 
of your books has ever had such a sale." "Then," 



LONGFELLOW. 109 

said the poet, calmly, "I think we had better let these 
people go on advertising it." 

The advance in the pecuniary value of Mr. Long- 
fellow's poems is somewhat remarkable. For " A Psalm 
of Life " he was promised j'lve dollars and received nothing. 
Eor " The Hanging of the Crane," a poem of two hun- 
dred lines, he received from Mr. Bonner four thousand 
■dollars. 

" Morituri Salutamus " is an address to his class 
on its fiftieth anniversary. The name is an allusion to 
the formula prescribed for the gladiators in accosting a 
Koman Emperor, when they are about to engage in 
deadly combat in his presence, — "We who are about to 
die salute you." The venerable class of 1825 are thus 
represented as saluting their Alma Mater on the eve of 
death. 

No American author, with the one exception of Mrs. 
Stowe, has been translated into so many languages as 
Mr. Longfellow. 

Certainly no other has been so honored abroad, in 
life and in death, as he. His poems are household words 
in England, and in Westminster Abbey, where only the 
honored dead are laid, is a monument erected to his 
memory by the English people. 

12. CoNCEET Eecitation - - " The Builders." 

13. Eecitation - "The Wreck of the Hesperus." 

14. Song - - - - "Excelsior." 

15. Beading ... Personal Traits. 
Mr. Longfellow's love of children is proverbial. 

Many stories are told illustrating this. A gentleman 
who had just come in, one day said to him: <*Mr. 



110 authors' birthdays. 

Longfellow, please stand at the window a moment. A 
little girl outside is trying to obtain a glimpse of you." 
Mr. Longfellow at once excused himself to his friend, 
went to the door, and called the child in. Then, taking 
her hand in his, he led her through the rooms, showing 
her what he thought would be of interest to her. 

His hospitality to all his guests was unfailing. He 
had much tact in adapting his conversation to the 
measure of the person addressed, and always had some- 
thing kind and courteous for all. The demands made 
upon his time by visitors and correspondents was enorm- 
ous, and it was a matter of regret to him that so many 
letters necessarily remained unanswered. 

His manner had the simplicity of a child, and yet 
no one would dare to go beyond the bound set by his 
gentle dignity. His own success did not make him in- 
different to the aspirations of unknown writers, and his 
sympathy and counsel were never sought in vain. Many 
writers have gratefully borne testimony to this since his 
death. "And," says his biographer, "many an author 
or artist has received not only unsolicited sympathy, 
but a substantial check in his hour of need." 

In 1880, Superintendent Peaslee, of Cincinnati^ 
wrote to Mr. Longfellow that he was preparing for a 
celebration of his birthday by the fifteen thousand 
school children of Cincinnati. 

Mr. Longfellow wrote in reply : " I can only send 
my Christmas and New Year's greeting to the grand 
army of your pupils and ask you to tell them, as I am 
sure you have often told them before, to live up to the 
best that is in them; to live noble lives — as they all 



LONGFELLOW. Ill 

may in whatever condition they may find themselves — 
■ so that their epitaph may be that of Euripides : — 

' This monument does not make thee famous, 
Euripides ! but thou makest the monument famous.' " 

Mr. Longfellow died March 24, 1882. His last 
written words, penned a week before his death, are 
peculiarly beautiful as " swan's strains : " 

" Out of the shadow of night, 
The world moves into light ; 
It is daybreak eTerywhere !" 

16. Eecitation - - - "A Psalm of Life." 

17. Song - - - " The Day is Done." 



REFERENCE BOOKS. 
lAfe of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. By Samuel Longfellow. 

Boston: Ticknor & Co. 
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. By F. H. Underwood. Boston: 

Ticknor & Co. 
Henry W. Longfellow. By W. Sloane Kennedy. Boston: D. 

Lothrop Co. 
Poets' Homes, Vol. I. Chicago and Boston: Interstate Pub. Co. 
Homes and Haunts of Our Elder Poets. R. H. Stoddard. New 

york: D. Appleton & Co. 
Longfellow's Boyhood. Wide Awake. 
Longfellow with his Children. Wide Awake, Feb. 1887. 
Longfellow Leaflets. Boston : Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 



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